Galatians Through the Centuries [1 ed.] 9780631230847, 9781118472668, 063123084X

Table of contents :
Galatians: Through the Centuries
Copyright
Contents
Series Editors’ Preface
Preface
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Aims and Method, Summary of Findings, Galatians as a ‘World-Building’ Text
Overview
Questions of Method
The Principal Commentators
Marcion
Augustine
John Chrysostom
Thomas Aquinas
Martin Luther
John Calvin
William Perkins
Ferdinand Christian Baur
Joseph Barber Lightfoot
More recent work on Galatians
Concluding Remarks
Galatians 1:1–9: The Beginning of Paul’s Argument
Literary and Historical Context of the Letter
Main Themes: 1:1–9
1 Paul’s Apostolic Authority
Patristic interpretation
Thomas Aquinas
Reformation readings
Nineteenth- century readings
2 The Understanding of Evil and Its Overcoming
Dualist readings
Patristic readings
Reformation readings
The modern period
Galatians 1:10–24: Paul Argues for His Independence as an Apostle (I); The ‘Conversion’ of Paul the Jew
Main Themes
1 Paul’s Relation to Judaism
2 Paul’s Conversion
The patristic and medieval period
Reformation readings
The modern period
Galatians 2:1–10: Paul Argues for His Independence as an Apostle (II); The Conference at Jerusalem
Historical Considerations
1 The Relationship of Acts and Galatians
2 Was Titus Circumcised?
3 'The Nature of the Dispute
Galatians 2:11–21: Justification by Faith: The New Life in Christ
Overview
1 Conflict at Antioch
Patristic and medieval period
Luther
Calvin
Perkins
The modern period
2 Justification by Faith and not by Works of the Law
Marcion
Chrysostom
Augustine
Thomas Aquinas
Luther
Calvin
Perkins
Baur
Lightfoot
Later nineteenth-and twentieth-century readings
3 Galatians 2:20 in the Mystical Tradition
Keiji Nishitani and the Kyoto school of Zen Buddhism
Galatians 3:1–14: Life in the Spirit Contrasted with Living under the Curse of the Law
Overview
1 The Argument from the Galatians’ Experience of the Spirit, vv. 1–5
Patristic readings
Thomas Aquinas
Luther
Calvin
Parenthetical note on witchcraft
Perkins
Hilgenfeld
Bultmann and after
2 Abraham as the Father of All Those Who Believe
2.1 Abraham as the Source of Blessing to Those that Believe
Patristic interpretation
Thomas Aquinas
Luther
Calvin
Perkins
Baur
Lightfoot
Twentieth-century readings
2.2 The Curse of the Law and Its Removal by Christ to Make Way for the Blessing of Abraham
Marcion
Chrysostom
Augustine
Thomas Aquinas
Luther
Calvin
Perkins
Hilgenfeld
Lightfoot
Twentieth-century interpretation
Galatians 3:15–29: The Purpose of the Law and the New Life of Sonship of God
Brief Analysis
1 The Purpose and Limits of the Law
Marcion
Chrysostom
Augustine
Thomas Aquinas
Luther
Calvin
Perkins
Lightfoot
Hilgenfeld
Twentieth-century interpretation
2 New Life as Sons (and Daughters?) of God
Patristic and medieval interpretation
Thomas Aquinas
Luther
Calvin
Perkins
Lightfoot
Hilgenfeld
Liberationist and feminist readings of Gal 3:28
Galatians 4:1–20: Paul Contrasts the Galatians’ Present State as Christians with Their Former Lives
Overview
1 The Galatians’ Former State
Dualist readings
Patristic and medieval interpretations
Luther
Calvin
Perkins
Hilgenfeld
Lightfoot
Twentieth-century readings
Galatians 4:21–31: A Concluding Allegory
The Nature of Paul’s Argument in This Section and Its Relation to the Argument of the Letter as a Whole
Interpretative Problems and Main Types of Interpretation
Galatians 4:22–30: The Hagar/Sarah Story and Its Allegorization
Patristic interpretations
Thomas Aquinas
Luther
Calvin
Perkins
Hilgenfeld
Lightfoot
Galatians 5: The New Life of Faith
Overview
1 Faith Working Through Love Fulfils the Law (5:1–15)
Augustine
Chrysostom
Aquinas
Luther
Calvin
Council of Trent
Perkins
Nineteenth-and twentieth-century readings
2 New Life in the Spirit
The Commentators
Dualist readings
Augustine
Chrysostom
Thomas Aquinas
Luther
Calvin
Perkins
Hilgenfeld
Lightfoot
Recent interpretations
Galatians 6: New Creation: Life Beyond the Law
Overview
1 Concluding Ethical Advice: Galatians 6:1–10
The patristic period
Thomas Aquinas
Luther
Calvin
Cudworth
Hilgenfeld
Lightfoot
Recent historical scholarship
2 A New Creation: Galatians 6:11–18
Dualist readings
Chrysostom
Augustine
Thomas Aquinas
Luther
Calvin
Cudworth
Hilgenfeld and Lightfoot
Twentieth-century readings and the influence of apocalyptic
Glossary
Works Cited
Illustrations
Index

Citation preview

Praise for Galatians Through the Centuries “This is a double triumph. By expert introduction and careful selection, John Riches ushers us into the long and richly diverse history of conversation between the text of Galatians and its most significant commentators. But he also shows us, through these well worked examples, that the meaning of this short but explosive text lies not behind but in the interpretations it has evoked over the centuries, and in the new worlds that it has spawned. This is a marvellous provocation for Pauline scholars, bidding them expand their conception of their intellectual task.” John Barclay, Durham University “One can only be grateful for the wealth of material assembled here. All theological libraries must have not only this attractive volume, but all the other volumes published in this series.” International Review of Biblical Studies “An in-depth, clear, and interesting study of Galatians … Those studying Galatians would find this commentary well worth their study.” European Journal of Theology “John Riches’ contribution to this excellent series is a well-focused, rich collection of work from key writers on Galatians from Marcion to the present day.” Journal for the Study of the New Testament “An invaluable treasure trove of carefully selected interpretations, but more important is the overall picture that it paints of the extensive dialogue about Galatians, and the questions the book raises about the relationship between the text and its readers.” Ecclesiastical History “This book is such a useful and admirable work of scholarship that I hesitate to find any fault with it.” Catholic Biblical Quarterly

Wiley-Blackwell Bible Commentaries Series Editors: John Sawyer, Christopher Rowland, Judith Kovacs, David M. Gunn John Through the Centuries Mark Edwards Revelation Through the Centuries Judith Kovacs & Christopher Rowland Judges Through the Centuries David M. Gunn Exodus Through the Centuries Scott M. Langston

Ecclesiastes Through the Centuries Eric S. Christianson Esther Through the Centuries Jo Carruthers Psalms Through the Centuries: Volume One Susan Gillingham Galatians Through the Centuries John Riches

Forthcoming: Leviticus Through the Centuries Mark Elliott 1 & 2 Samuel Through the Centuries David M. Gunn 1 & 2 Kings Through the Centuries Martin O’Kane Psalms Through the Centuries: Volume Two Susan Gillingham Song of Songs Through the Centuries Francis Landy & Fiona Black Isaiah Through the Centuries John F. A. Sawyer Jeremiah Through the Centuries Mary Chilton Callaway Lamentations Through the Centuries Paul M. Joyce & Diane Lipton Ezekiel Through the Centuries Andrew Mein Jonah Through the Centuries Yvonne Sherwood

The Minor Prophets Through the Centuries Jin Han & Richard Coggins Mark Through the Centuries Christine Joynes Luke Through the Centuries Larry Kreitzer The Acts of the Apostles Through the Centuries Heidi J. Hornik & Mikeal C. Parsons Romans Through the Centuries Paul Fiddes 1 Corinthians Through the Centuries Jorunn Okland 2 Corinthians Through the Centuries Paula Gooder Hebrews Through the Centuries John Lyons James Through the Centuries David Gowler Pastoral Epistles Through the Centuries Jay Twomey

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

Galatians Through the Centuries

John Riches

This paperback edition first published 2013 © 2013 John Riches Edition history: Blackwell Publishing Ltd (hardback, 2008) Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell. Registered Office John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK Editorial Offices 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell. The right of John Riches to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Riches, John Kenneth. Galatians through the centuries / John Riches. p. cm.—(Wiley-Blackwell Bible Commentaries) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-631-23084-7 (cloth) — ISBN 978-1-118-47266-8 (pbk.) 1. Bible. N.T. Galatians—Commentaries. I. Title. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Cover image: St Michael fighting the dragon (Revelation 12:7–9), woodcut by Albrecht Dürer, 1498, from The Revelation of St John Cover design by www.cyandesign.co.uk Set in 10/12.5pt Minion by SPi Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India 1

2013

To Emma, Helen and Susanna James, Tom, David, Jennifer, Hannah and Sophie

Contents

Series Editors’ Preface

ix

Preface

xi

List of Abbreviations

xv

Introduction: Aims and Method, Summary of Findings, Galatians as a ‘World-Building’ Text

1

Galatians 1:1–9: The Beginning of Paul’s Argument

66

Galatians 1:10–24: Paul Argues for His Independence as an Apostle (I); The ‘Conversion’ of Paul the Jew

83

viii

Contents

Galatians 2:1–10: Paul Argues for His Independence as an Apostle (II); The Conference at Jerusalem

96

Galatians 2:11–21: Justification by Faith: The New Life in Christ

105

Galatians 3:1–14: Life in the Spirit Contrasted with Living under the Curse of the Law

144

Galatians 3:15–29: The Purpose of the Law and the New Life of Sonship of God

188

Galatians 4:1–20: Paul Contrasts the Galatians’ Present State as Christians with Their Former Lives

214

Galatians 4:21–31: A Concluding Allegory

227

Galatians 5: The New Life of Faith

245

Galatians 6: New Creation: Life Beyond the Law

284

Glossary

302

Works Cited

309

Illustrations

319

Index

320

Series Editors’ Preface The Blackwell Bible Commentaries series, the first to be devoted primarily to the reception history of the Bible, is based on the premise that how people have interpreted, and been influenced by, a sacred text like the Bible is often as interesting and historically important as what it originally meant. The series emphasizes the influence of the Bible on literature, art, music, and film, its role in the evolution of religious beliefs and practices, and its impact on social and political developments. Drawing on work in a variety of disciplines, it is designed to provide a convenient and scholarly means of access to material until now hard to find, and a much-needed resource for all those interested in the influence of the Bible on Western culture. Until quite recently this whole dimension was for the most part neglected by biblical scholars. The goal of a commentary was primarily, if not exclusively, to get behind the centuries of accumulated Christian and Jewish tradition to

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Series Editors’ Preface

one single meaning, normally identified with the author’s original intention. The most important and distinctive feature of the Blackwell Commentaries is that they will present readers with many different interpretations of each text, in such a way as to heighten their awareness of what a text, especially a sacred text, can mean and what it can do, what it has meant and what it has done, in the many contexts in which it operates. The Blackwell Bible Commentaries will consider patristic, rabbinic (where relevant), and medieval exegesis, as well as insights from various types of modern criticism, acquainting readers with a wide variety of interpretative techniques. As part of the history of interpretation, questions of source, date, authorship, and other historical-critical and archaeological issues will be discussed, but since these are covered extensively in existing commentaries, such references will be brief, serving to point readers in the direction of readily accessible literature where they can be followed up. Original to this series is the consideration of the reception history of specific biblical books arranged in commentary format. The chapter-by-chapter arrangement ensures that the biblical text is always central to the discussion. Given the wide influence of the Bible and the richly varied appropriation of each biblical book, it is a difficult question which interpretations to include. While each volume will have its own distinctive point of view, the guiding principle for the series as a whole is that readers should be given a representative sampling of material from different ages, with emphasis on interpretations that have been especially influential or historically significant. Though commentators will have their preferences among the different interpretations, the material will be presented in such a way that readers can make up their own minds on the value, morality, and validity of particular interpretations. The series encourages readers to consider how the biblical text has been interpreted down the ages, and seeks to open their eyes to different uses of the Bible in contemporary culture. The aim is to write a series of scholarly commentaries that draw on all the insights of modern research to illustrate the rich interpretative potential of each biblical book. John Sawyer Christopher Rowland Judith Kovacs David M. Gunn

Preface I have long suspected that there is at least as much to be learnt about texts from examining the ways in which they have been read and have shaped the lives of their readers, indeed of whole communities of readers, as from our attempts to reconstruct their author’s original intention. Schweitzer’s two accounts of nineteenth-century interpretations of Jesus and Paul were for me a starting point for my own work; later, Ulrich Luz’s commentary on Matthew showed the great gains in understanding which could accrue from a close study of a Gospel’s history of effects. Margaret Mitchell’s work on Chrysostom provided further encouragement, as have the circle around Daniel Patte. My own occasional sorties into the history of interpretation of Matthew, Romans and Galatians confirmed that there were significant discoveries to be made about the life and vitality of texts, and indeed the need sometimes to counter widespread views about their reception. It is interesting to reflect on the fact that while historical critics have been happy to accept a broad account of the deleterious effect of Lutheran interpretations of Paul on our understanding of his letters (deleterious not only in that they mask Paul’s original intentions but also in their impact

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on the churches’ attitudes to the Jews), few have shown much interest in checking out the accuracy of such accounts. To discover that Blackwell was planning a whole series of reception-historical commentaries on each of the books of the Bible and then to be allocated the commentary on Galatians was a cause for celebration. The last seven years during which I have worked on this project have both confirmed my belief in the gains to be made from a study of the reception history of a work like Galatians and brought many surprises. It has been my constant experience that a given reading of a passage initially appears relatively unremarkable, and yet, once seen in context and compared with other readings, earlier and later, will suddenly come into sharper focus, so that its vigour, its particular nuances and emphases begin to appear, and one can begin to see why this reading has spawned communities very different from those of its near contemporaries. If one compares John Chrysostom and Augustine (as we shall) and indeed Jerome (whom we shall not, for reasons of space), one can see how three very different communities of readers have emerged from their commentaries on Galatians, all written within a few decades and indeed a few hundred miles of each other. It is perhaps not an exaggeration to say that from these three readings have emerged, over time, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Western Catholicism and Protestantism (however much Catholics and Protestants may have fought over Augustine’s heritage). And, connected with all this, was the growing realization that biblical commentators, at least up until the time of the development of historical-critical studies, were all engaged in a kind of extended conversation, with each new generation engaging with its predecessors. Inevitably, in a work such as this, one can present only a few of the voices in such a conversation, and this must lead to a degree of oversimplification. Nevertheless, in working through the various readings which our chosen commentators offer of a particular passage, there is sometimes a quite remarkable sense of interaction between the different readings, as if each new period explores implications of what had previously been taken from the text. There is, that is to say, a remarkably continuous literary history stretching through the major commentators on this small but dynamic text. One other discovery deserves mention here, and this is the extent to which this literary history provides an insight into the development of Christian doctrine. It would be a great gain if commentaries like this could encourage historians of doctrine to give greater attention to the history of biblical interpretation. Over the last  or so years there has been much debate among philosophers and literary theorists about the nature of texts and the respective roles of authors and readers. There have been sustained attacks on the notion of authorial intention, on the very notion of a text itself, while much light has been shed on the role of readers in determining the meaning of a given text. Certainly studies like this present volume make clear how important the role of the reader is in realizing the meaning of a text. I have found the work of the literary theorist and critic

Preface

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Hans-Robert Jauss particularly helpful in trying to think about the relation of the commentator to the literary history he inherits, to his own social and cultural world and to the text he studies. Many issues remain open, however. It would be impossible to discuss a polemical letter such as Galatians, without referring in some way to Paul’s intentions in arguing as he did, even if our reconstructions of that intention will always be contentious, and less than certain. And it is difficult to find quite the right words and analogies to describe the continuing vitality and influence of the text. It is true to say, with Robert Morgan, that texts are like dead men with no rights, so that interpreters can in a measure deal with them as they will. But does this particular phrase do justice to the constantly subversive nature of a text like Galatians, which seems to have a life and a will of its own? Similarly, to speak of the after-lives of texts like the biblical texts is rightly to affirm that they live on after their writing and continue to influence their readers; but it also seems to suggest a sense in which the real life of the text was before its reception, while the evidence is that a text like Galatians may sweep through whole countries with unprecedented force , years after its writing. We might be tempted to speak of the text as one voice in the conversation between commentators past and present, but only in the paradoxical sense that that voice can be heard only through the voices of others, sometimes distorted, sometimes muted, sometimes trumpeted. However that may be, it remains a powerful presence in the ongoing dialogue, with a vitality all of its own. No book is written without the help of others. The Arts and Humanities Research Board and the University of Glasgow generously allowed me a year’s study leave to work on this project. The AHRB/C were also patient and magnanimous in allowing me to finish in my own time and not according to the official timescale for such undertakings. A book like this is probably never finished, but at least I hope it is more nearly finished now than it would otherwise have been. To the editors of the series, Chris Rowland, John Sawyer, Judith Kovacs and now David Gunn, my thanks for their pioneering work in creating this series and for their particular advice and help with my volume. Judith Kovacs has gently pointed out errors and oversights, and made many constructive suggestions. It has been a pleasure and encouragement to meet with other contributors to the series. I have also profited greatly from collaboration with Daniel Patte and his colleagues in the Romans through History and Cultures meetings at SBL. It has been good too to meet with contributors to the Novum Testamentum Patristicum series, to be published by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, who hosted some memorable discussions in Göttingen. My particular thanks to Tobias Niklas and Andreas Merkt, the editors, and to Martin Meiser, who generously allowed me to see drafts of his Galatians volume. Many colleagues and friends have helped in many ways, at seminars and in chance encounters, too many to list in full, among them, John Barclay, Stephen Chester, Troels Engberg Pedersen, Bridget Gilfillan-Upton, Judith Gundry-Volf, Ian Hazlitt, David Horrell, Joel Marcus and

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Perry Schmidt-Leukel. The latter kindly drew my attention to the work of Nishitani. Betty Knott-Sharpe gave enormously generously of her time and expertise in assisting me with the Latin of Augustine, Jerome and Aquinas. The editorial staff at Blackwell, Rebecca Harkins, Andrew Humphries and Karen Wilson, have been patient and supportive over the course of the project. I am grateful to Charlotte Davies and Jean van Altena for all their careful and watchful work on the preparation of the typescript, and to Meg Davies for the index. To all, my sincere thanks. There are, I fear, a greater number to whom I owe more than I am aware of, who have had to put up with my involvement and absorption in this project, when more of my attention and time might have been given to them. To my family, my colleagues in the Scottish Episcopal Church, to the editorial team of the Expository Times, Karen Wenell and Paul Foster, and to many others, warm thanks for their patience and support. In the last seven years, while I have been writing this book, Emma, Helen and Susanna have given Nena and me (and brought up!) six wonderful grandchildren, James, Tom, David, Jennifer, Hannah and Sophie. It is to them that this book is dedicated. John Riches May 

Preface to the Paperback Edition I am delighted that this commentary will now become more easily available to students of Galatians and to those who wish to teach courses on the reception history of Paul and Galatians. Understanding of the importance of reception history continues to grow within the circle of biblical scholars but there remains much to be done. The paradox of a discipline deeply committed to an historical reading of the biblical texts yet largely uninterested in the history of the construction of their meaning remains for the most part unobserved and unaddressed. The confidence with which over 150 years ago scholars like Lightfoot set out to discover the singular meaning of Paul’s letter to the Galatians by historical and lexicographical study of the texts in their original context and without reference to the previous 1500 years of interpretation remains largely undiminished, despite the irreducible plurality of answers which such attempts have generated. This volume is offered again in the belief that a study of the reception of this remarkable text over two thousand years can contribute to a fuller appreciation of the richness and plurality of meaning which the letter has generated. Five years ago this commentary was dedicated to our six grandchildren and their mothers. I would like take this opportunity to add to that dedication the names of Sam, Euan and Kate. May they all continue to thrive! John Riches June 2012

Abbreviations

ANF CCSL CF CSEL EH Fort. JThS LW NPNF NPNF PG

Ante-Nicene Fathers Corpus Christianorum, series latina The Christian Faith in the Doctrinal Documents of the Catholic Church Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum Latinorum The English Hymnal Augustine, contra Fortunatum Journal of Theological Studies American edition of Luther’s Works. Philadelphia and St. Louis, – Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, st series Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, nd series Patrologia Graeca

xvi

Abbreviations

PL RGG SNTW ST TRE WA WUNT ZThK Augustine, ep. Augustine, Civ. Dei Augustine, Faust. Augustine, Simpl. Calvin, Instit. CH and DN Clem. Alex. Strom. CR DS

Eusebius, h.e. Exc. ex Theod. Gosp. Phil. Ignatius, Magn. Irenaeus, AH Jerome, ad Gal Jerome, ep. LXX mend. Origen, CJ Origen, Comm. Joh. Ps. Clem. Hom Seneca, ep. Tertullian, Marc.

Patrologia Latina Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). rd edition – Studies of the New Testament and its World Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Theologische Real-Enzyklopaedie D. Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Weimar, – Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche epistulae City of God Contra Faustum Ad Simplicianum Institutes of the Christian Religion Pseudo Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy and Divine Names Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis Corpus reformatorum Enchiridion symbolorum, definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum. Ed. H. Denzinger and A. Schönmetzer Ecclesiastical History Excerpts from Theodotus The Gospel of Philip Epistle to the Magnesians Against the Heresies ad Galatas Letters Septuagint De mendacio Commentarium in Johannis Commentary on John Pseudo-Clementine Homilies epistulae Against Marcion

Introduction Aims and Method, Summary of Findings, Galatians as a ‘World-Building’ Text Overview This is a book about books about a letter written in the first century by a Jewish radical who turned his world upside down. It is, to put it somewhat differently, a literary history of a – very short – text, which has its origins in a formative moment of religious history in Asia Minor out of which a new world religion emerged. What is intriguing in this history is to see how, like a proxy for its author, this letter continues to exert a formative, often disruptive and subversive, influence on Rome and Byzantium, on Reformation and post-Reformation Europe, in a way few other books can rival. From these defining moments in human history the shock waves flow out to encompass, in the course of two millennia, the whole globe: the Americas, Asia, Africa, Australasia. One has only to think of the influence of Calvin’s reading of Paul to become aware of the power that flows from the reception of this letter. Galatians Through the Centuries, First Edition. John Riches. © 2013 John Riches. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.



Introduction

Rather unusually, this volume of the Blackwell reception historical commentary series takes the form almost exclusively of a literary history. Other texts of the Bible will exert their influence through forms of human creativity other than literature: visual art, music, drama, film. Galatians’ influence is carried predominantly through the written and preached word. In particular, the literary history which we are attempting to trace is dominated by the commentary form. This fact in itself says something about the particular way in which the letter has been received and made its impact on those communities who have taken it to heart. Other literary histories, say those of the novel or the sonnet or tragedy, operate by way of imitation, either of formal innovations (the confessional novel) or of particular instantiations of the genre (Racine’s and Goethe’s Iphigenia) or more generally by quotation and allusion. Biblical narratives lend themselves readily to such imitation and retelling: Genesis has a long literary history from Jubilees to Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers. Paul’s letters certainly find their formal imitators in the deutero-Pauline letters (those now thought to be wrongly attributed to Paul), but this is not the way that they would be principally received. The first commentary on Galatians to appear in the East was written by Origen in the first half of the third century, with the real explosion of commentaries occurring in the second half of the fourth century. Of these we shall pay close attention to the commentaries, from the East, of John Chrysostom (c.) and, from the West, of Augustine (). What is significant about the commentary form is that it provides an arena for readers both to wrestle with the precise meaning of Paul’s compressed and often ambiguous text and to engage in dialogue with other readers in the tradition. This dialogue continues right up to the nineteenth century, until it is broken off by historical critical interpreters, including even those who know the tradition well, like Lightfoot. Such readers will in the end dialogue only with those who employ the same historical tools as themselves. Yet, no matter how narrowly or widely the circle is drawn, debate and engagement with other commentators is an integral aspect of the commentary form, and one of its continuing sources of attraction to writers. It is, however, the elusiveness and difficulty of Paul’s text which makes the commentary form so essential to the reading of Galatians: how are we to resolve the ambiguities of Paul’s arguments, to half-guess the nature of the arguments to which Paul is replying, without attempting to piece out its meaning sentence by sentence? The continuous commentary on the text forces the commentator to address these difficulties and puzzles and to offer a solution. Moreover, the commentary form not only allows the writer to resolve some of these puzzles for the benefit of him/herself and of the readers of the commentary; it allows the commentator, consciously or otherwise, to fill out the gaps and resolve the ambiguities in the text by drawing on her (though there are few female commentators) own experience and beliefs. In this commentators

Introduction



will draw both on experiences and beliefs which have been nurtured within the Christian community and on those which have their roots in communities and movements of thought outside the church. In this way, commentators create new social worlds, help to nurture new communities for whom this text has a defining quality. It is significant that the first great burgeoning of commentaries occurs as the people of the Mediterranean embark on the deep cultural transition from the world of Antiquity to that of Catholic Christianity/the Great Church. This growth in commentaries marks the moment at which the enormous potential of the biblical writings is fully grasped and the first steps to its realization taken. For Augustine, ‘such is the depth of the Christian Scriptures that, even if I were attempting to study them and nothing else, from boyhood to decrepit old age, with the utmost leisure, the most unwearied zeal, and with talents greater than I possess, I would still be making progress in discovering their treasures . . .’ (ep. .; quoted in Brown : ). As Brown comments, Augustine is implying that ‘the Christians, too, possessed a classic as inexhaustible and as all-absorbing as Vergil and Homer had been to the pagans’. The task was to open those treasures to his Christian readers in such a way as to enable them to build their own, new world. Galatians provided an open invitation to such an undertaking: had not its saviour rescued believers ‘from this present evil age’ (:), and did not Paul conclude his letter with the proclamation of a ‘new creation’, which meant that the old order and its laws no longer ‘counted for anything’ (:)? However, at the same time as Chrysostom and his fellow Antiochene commentators and Augustine in North Africa were constructing new worlds to replace the old world of pagan Antiquity, they were also locked in conflict with those who would provide their own alternatives: Augustine with the dualist Manichees, Chrysostom with the Jews. And while Galatians was potentially an embarrassing ally when confronting the Manichees, it was easily (all too easily?) co-opted in the struggle against Chrysostom’s Jewish rivals in Antioch. Paul too had faced those with very different ideas as to how to shape the emerging new world, and his polemic against his Jewish-Christian opponents is a feature of the letter which will be powerfully attractive for those who seek its support in their attempts to shape their own communities. For Chrysostom, the connection between Paul’s Judaizing opponents in Galatia and the Jewish community in Antioch was not far to seek; Augustine would make the connection between the world of Antiquity and Paul’s opponents in terms of their love of honour and glory, of their carnal understanding of Law and their slavish desire for the rewards that it conveyed. And these more analogical connections will remain part of the repertory of Christian commentators for the next thousand years and more.

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Introduction

If the fourth century marks one of the major cultural changes in the history of Europe, so too does the Reformation, and here we can observe with much greater clarity the way in which this small letter provides ‘the fuel of a blast furnace’ as Brown says of the Bible as a whole for Augustine (: ). Galatians was the book that Luther prized above all others in the Bible, naming it, after his wife, his ‘Käthe von Bora’. With its sharp divisions between the righteousness of works and the righteousness of faith, it enabled him to drive a wedge between late medieval theology and the new understanding of God’s justice through which he sought release from the terrors of conscience which beset him as an – Augustinian – friar. Such indeed is the power of Luther’s reading of Galatians, that his own commentary now becomes one of the principal channels of the letter’s influence, referred to by Bunyan in terms remarkably similar to those that Luther had used to refer to the letter itself: Well, after many such longings in my mind, the God in whose hands are all our days and ways, did cast into my hand (one day) a book of Martin Luther; it was his Comment on the Galatians; it also was so old, that it was ready to fall piece from piece if I did but turn it over. Now I was pleased much that such an old Book had fallen into my hand; the which, when I had but a little way perused, I found my condition, in his experience, so largely and profoundly handled, as if his Book had been written out of my heart. This made me marvel; for thus thought I, This Man could not know anything of the state of Christians now, but must needs write and speak the experience of former days. Besides he doth most gravely also in that Book, debate of the rise of these temptations, namely, Blasphemy, Desperation, and the like; showing that the Law of Moses as well as the Devil, Death, and Hell hath a very great hand therein: The which, at first, was very strange to me; but considering and watching, I found it so indeed. But of particulars here I intend nothing; only this methinks I must let fall before all men, I do prefer this book of Martin Luther upon the Galatians (excepting the Holy Bible,) before all the Books that ever I have seen, as most fit for a wounded Conscience. (Bunyan : )

One should not suppose that the readings which commentators offer of Galatians are all by any means subversive or revolutionary. We shall look at those which address a Christian audience very secure in its grip on power and its place in society, which nevertheless seeks to clarify its own self-understanding through vigorous debate and questioning. Aquinas’s commentary is in many ways a model attempt at reconstructing Paul’s arguments and addressing the theological questions which they raise. Similarly, those who live in the period immediately after Luther’s break with Rome will struggle both to come to terms with the changes in cosmology and anthropology which Luther’s reading of Galatians effected and to tame a text whose revolutionary dynamism could easily threaten their uneasy grip on the societies which emerged in this period.

Introduction



Much will depend on the interpretation of Paul’s often cryptic statements about the Law, a term which itself becomes elusive: what is it to speak of ‘fulfilling the law of Christ’ (:)? And how are such statements to be set alongside injunctions to ‘walk in the Spirit’ (:)? How, indeed, are injunctions about walking in the Spirit to be taken, in the light of Paul’s references to the Galatians’ being ‘led by the Spirit’ (:)? For Calvin and Perkins such statements require to be clarified, and their own positions buttressed against those who found in them a licence to challenge the newly established authority of the Reformed Churches. Puritans like Perkins sought readings of the letter which would provide, among other things, social stability and probity in a society which was offically Christian. Those Christians who lived in the aftermath of the upheavals of the late eighteeenth and early nineteenth centuries must, by contrast, have felt almost swept away by the subversive and revolutionary zeal of their times. Yet, if they were not to be simply dismissed by the ‘cultured despisers’ of the times (the phrase is from Schleiermacher’s Speeches to the Cultured Despisers of our Times, ), they needed to show how the Christian spirit continued to reflect the deepest spirit of the times. Baur sought to do this historically by showing how the Christian literature of the first (as he thought) two centuries gave expression to a new universal God-consciousness which reflected the major socio-cultural changes occurring throughout the Mediterranean. The subsequent history of the church was a struggle to give true expression to this new universal consciousness, which was at some times more obscured than at others, which emerged into greater clarity with the Reformers, and was further refined in the work of the historical critics of the nineteenth century. This provided the basis for a ‘cultural Protestantism’ which was deeply imbued with a sense of history – the sense, that is, that it was heir to and the vehicle of the great forces of history. All this is no more than to point up some of the key moments in this remarkable history. From each of the figures whom we have mentioned, great branches reach out, from the Middle East, from Africa, from Europe, linking the most diverse parts of the world, taking root on other continents, in turn putting out new shoots and re-rooting themselves afresh on new lands. Any account we can give can offer no more than the briefest outline of the relationships between some of these key moments, one in no sense complete but nonetheless indicative of the extraordinary connectivity between such readers and readings.

Questions of Method The question for the literary historian is how to give a coherent account of the reception of a particular text which explains the sometimes quite extraordinary



Introduction

diversity of literary and social manifestations linked to it. To what extent are such manifestations, in our case the very varied commentaries on Galatians, of which we shall focus on only a relatively few major examples, and the emergence of new societies and cultures to which they are linked – to what extent are such manifestations the product of the text itself (diversity resulting from the Sinnpotential of the text itself, Luz : ), and to what extent are they the product of the changing circumstances, economic, social, political, cultural, philosophical, under which they are read? As Hans Robert Jauss has argued, literary texts have a dialectical relationship to the political, social and economic realities of their times. They are hardly simply the ideological reflections of such realities: how then would one explain, in the light of the relatively slow rate of change on the economic and political level, the often remarkable rate of change of literary production, formally and substantively? Part of the answer must be that literature is not just weltabbildend but also, importantly, weltbildend (Jauss : –): it does not simply, that is to say, reflect or imitate the world out of which it comes, but is itself involved in the shaping of that world. And, in an important step, which moves the debate beyond the theoretical parameters of earlier, Marxist and formalist discussions, its world-building function is seen to be mediated through its interaction with the reader, through, that is to say, its reception at any given time by a particular public. Any attempt to write a literary history, whether of a national literature, a particular genre or, as here, a particular work, must take account of the power of a work to shape its readers, to create a new readership, new in the sense that its sensibilities, its understanding of the world and society and of individual lives as located in society – but also as set within a cosmos which may include angels and demons, gods and God – have been informed and re-formed by their reading of the work, however that process of reception takes place. This power of a text to shape the ‘horizon of expectations’ of its readership is what gives its reception history its particular character: each generation of readers comes to the text with a different set of understandings, sensibilities and expectations, and each interaction between the text and its ‘new’ readers creates again a new readership, just so long as the text retains its power to engage and transform: thereafter it joins the vast army of the laid aside and forgotten. But this interaction is not one-sided: the text shaping and changing the reading public again and again, till the point is reached that the text no longer resonates with the public’s horizons of understanding. The reading public also brings its prior understanding and expectations to the text and gives power to the text through the meanings it constructs out of it. ‘The historical life of a literary work is inconceivable without the active participation of its addressee’ (Jauss : ). Central, then, to the writing of the literary history of a given work is the under-

Introduction



standing of how it is received over time. The way a text is read within a particular community depends on the expectations (the ‘horizons of expectation’) with which the readers approach it. These in turn are generated by the ‘prior understanding of the genre, the form and the thematic of previously known works and by the contrast between poetic and practical language’ (Jauss : ). In the case of our letter one might say, first, that for most of its history Galatians has been approached generically as a work of Sacred Scripture, belonging to the church’s canon, consisting of the Old and New Testaments. Secondly, in formal terms, the work has been universally taken to be an apostolic letter addressing particular concerns of the early church, though there have been considerable differences of view about the precise nature of the letter’s argument. Thirdly, there has been widespread agreement that the letter’s central theme was the question of the continuing observation of the Old Testament laws, though again there has been a considerable variety of view about the relative prominence of the other theological, ethical and anthropological topics which it addresses. Its language, fourthly, has generally been regarded as biblical in character, with commentators being alert to Paul’s use of scriptural quotation and allusion. However, while throughout the history of reception of the letter there has been a wide awareness of Paul’s debt to rhetorical styles of speech and to contemporary idiom, such awareness is clearly related to the state of knowledge at any given time of the popular form of Greek and the ancient rhetorical conventions that Paul used. Such broad areas of prior understanding, such ‘horizons of expectation’, will certainly take somewhat different form at different times. To read a text as a canonical text, as Moshe Halberthal has pointed out, may well be to change its meaning; for the text, which may have advocated views which would be regarded as heretical by the orthodox interpreter, ‘must be justified in the eyes of the expositor’ (Halberthal : ). It may be that Galatians enjoins its readers not to allow the Law to determine their ethical choices and action, but such a view may be unacceptable to those whose communities look to the Law to provide stability and order in their societies and therefore requires to be challenged, reconstructed. However that may be, there are certainly different expectations held by orthodox Christian commentators about what one would expect to find in a canonical letter, which depend on the state of Christian orthodoxy at any given time. Greater differences will occur in commentators like Marcion, who have very different canons, rejecting the writings of the Old Testament and much of the New, and in historical critical scholars who set aside the text’s canonical status and approach the text as any other ancient religious text, a text from a strange world, written in an ancient and dead language. Here the danger is that philological and historical enquiry may displace, even, at an extreme, outlaw the attempt to uncover the theological, ethical and anthropological sense



Introduction

of the text. Again, there are important differences between those who read the letter to the Galatians as one among  Pauline epistles, as traditionally held, and those who, whether they choose to read the texts canonically or not, want to distinguish between authentic and inauthentic ‘Pauline’ letters. Important as is the interpreter’s prior understanding of the text’s genre, much of the drama of the struggle for the meaning of the text will come from the simple engagement with the obscurity, ambiguity, openness, pregnancy and elliptical nature of some of Paul’s utterances. Examples are not difficult to find. When Paul says that neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is of any use but a new creation/creature (kainē ktisis, :), is he referring to a new world with a new creator distinct from the creator of the old world? Is he referring to a new creature within the existing creation, and if so, is this creature a new principle: faith working through love, justification by faith, or a new person brought about by the workings of these principles? (And are those workings principally the work of the Spirit or of the believer?) Or is the sense somewhere in between: the birth of the new creation is the result of the Saviour’s death which has put an end to this present evil order of things and inaugurated a new world no longer based on the old oppositions of Law and not-Law but of flesh and spirit? It is not difficult to see how such different readings will inspire and in turn be inspired by very different visions of Christianity and lead to the development of very different kinds of community. What is difficult, if not impossible, to say is where the weight of influence lies: is it on the social and political constellation of events within which the text is read, or is it on the hearing of this text in a particular situation? In the trials of Luther’s life does Galatians speak to him differently in –/ and /? Or do we have to say that the different readings are the result of changes in his own prior understanding? While answers to such questions are not to be had, the task for the historian is to see where the correlations lie: how Luther’s readings find their ‘ecological niches’ in the changing circumstances of his life, and how they each in turn illuminate aspects of his favourite text. They would hardly have the power that they do if that were not so; this is one of the constraints of the commentary form: that its power and attraction are a function of the fit between the commentator’s overall understanding of the text and the text itself. However compelling an account of Christian faith and living a commentator may offer of the text, it will ultimately commend itself only insofar as it also offers a compelling reading of the text itself. So what of the text itself? What is so remarkable about this short letter of six chapters that it has enjoyed such a remarkably rich history of influence? Part of its power lies in the sheer passion with which it is written. Paul, the founder of the church in Galatia, is attempting to combat the influence of teachers operating in Galatia whose doctrines would in his opinion completely undermine ‘his’

Introduction



gospel. Such is the life-giving power of the message which Paul has received, that anything which contradicts it is accursed (:!), and destroys the new life of the Spirit of God which he and the Galatians have experienced (:). The question at issue is at root a simple one: should Gentile converts be circumcised and obey all aspects of the Jewish Law, including all the liturgical and dietary regulations? This is what the teachers are claiming, and Paul’s response takes its starting point in the fact that his converts have experienced life in the Spirit of God (what more could one ask for?) by listening to his preaching and not as a result of their observance of the Law (:). And, to make matters more threatening for Paul, this is not just a local dispute; similar issues have surfaced in the recent past in dealings between the churches at Antioch and Jerusalem, which had seemed to have been resolved (:–) but which then surfaced again in an angry flare-up between Paul and Peter in Antioch, where Paul accused Peter of hypocrisy and which, it appears has yet to be resolved (:–). So the theological issue of the nature and continuing status of the Law is linked to a further issue of personal authority: who, in this new, dynamic movement has the power to resolve such disputes? By what authority does Paul seek to counter the views of Peter and the church leaders in Jerusalem, who were after all, disciples of Jesus in his lifetime? Paul’s response to this crisis in his life and the life of the church is in three parts. In the first two chapters, he defends his own personal authority by arguing that he has received his gospel directly from God, ‘through a revelation of Jesus Christ’, and not ‘from or through human beings’ (:–). This is done in the form of a narrative which describes his early ministry and encounters with the Jerusalem church, arguing that he was in no way dependent for his gospel on their instruction (at most they had compared notes after some years, :) and setting out his own consistency of teaching and behaviour, by contrast with that of Peter (:–). Discussion of his dispute with Peter leads him to open up the issue between them: whether justice, right standing with God, life in the presence of God, is dependent on faith in Christ or on observance of the Law (:), and this leads into a passage of almost mystical intensity (certainly one greatly loved by the mystics) in which Paul speaks of the intimacy of his union with Christ (:). The second section contains a cluster of arguments supportive of Paul’s view that the new life in Christ derives from faith in Christ and not from observance of the Law. These may be rather differently analysed, as we shall see, but fairly clearly they start with Paul’s appeal to the Galatians’ own experience of new life in the Spirit before they began to observe the Law (:–) and then put great emphasis on the view that the new life that they have received as sons of Abraham was promised to Abraham’s offspring because of his (Abraham’s) belief in God (:). The offspring about whom the promise is made is Christ; believers share in the promise because, at their baptism, they have been united by faith



Introduction

to Christ and are therefore sons of Abraham. In this way God’s overarching purpose is made good. The giving of the Law, by contrast, was only a temporary measure to hold things under control until such time as faith should come (:). In chapter  the arguments are directed to finding suitable analogies for the state of those who lived before faith by comparison with the present state of believers. Here Paul deploys a complex double comparison between slaves and free sons and sons before and after reaching their minority. Slaves clearly live a life deprived of liberty and are at the mercy of their masters; free sons, by contrast, enjoy the freedom of heirs, but only once they come into their majority. As minors, their situation is not different from that of slaves, except insofar as their prospects are concerned. The implication seems to be that to take up observation of the Law would be to go back to a state of slavery, as the state of Jews under the Law (though being heirs) was effectively that of slaves. Paul tries another analogy, that between Abraham’s two sons, Isaac and Ishmael, one born from a free woman, Sarah, and one from a slave, Hagar. We shall see how complicated this analogy becomes in the application. The section ends with the conclusion: for freedom Christ has set us free, clearly excluding further subjection to the Law for believers. The third section, while still turning over some of the arguments in the previous two chapters, moves on to set out the implications for the Galatians’ manner of life of what Paul has said so far. The believers’ grounds for hope lie in their faith, in which love is at work (:). They must not abuse their freedom from the Law, as if that meant they could do whatever they liked, but rather they must serve one another in love (:), being led by the Spirit (:). As such, they will not be under the Law, but neither will they be slaves to the flesh producing its works (:–). Rather, they will walk in the Spirit and bear its fruit (:–). The letter concludes with a series of injunctions and Paul’s final great exclamation, as it were the distillation of all that he has been fighting for in the course of this passionate letter: ‘Far be it for me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. For neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation’ (:–). This remarkable vision of the cross as the source of release from the toils of the old way of life and of radical newness of life drives the letter and accounts for much of its often disruptive power.

Introduction



The Principal Commentators Marcion Marcion was born in Sinope, a Greek city in Pontus on the southern shores of the Black Sea, c. CE, probably the son of the local bishop, who, it was said, excommunicated him for heresy. Pontus was also home to Jewish communities, and the Jewish (proselyte) Bible translator Aquila appears also to have been born in Sinope at the same time. Harnack speculates that Marcion and his father were converts from Judaism, and that this explains his extreme anti-Jewish stance, which goes beyond Paul’s rejection of the Law to embrace ‘the lawgiver and the Old Testament’. Others have suggested that Marcion was influenced by Gnosticism or Greek philosophy. However that may be, Marcion moved to Rome, became a member of the church, and, after some years, in  CE presented his teaching to its ‘presbyters and teachers, the disciples of the disciples of the apostles’ (Hippolytus, Syntagma, reconstruction in Harnack : *–*). This led to his condemnation and his founding of his own church, which remained a serious threat to Catholic Christianity (the church of the as yet undivided orthodox Christians) until the latter’s emergence as the official church of the Empire in the fourth century. Certainly, it seems likely that Marcion’s theology is driven by his concern to clarify the relationship between Christianity and Judaism and, within that complex of problems, to determine the role and authority of the Law and the Old Testament. While according to some traditions Marcion was influenced by the Gnostic Cerdo, Harnack and others dispute this and see him as a church theologian whose interests lie in clarifying the grounds of Christian theology (Harnack : , n. ; Aland : ). None of Marcion’s writings survive. We are dependent for our knowledge of his works and beliefs largely on the account given of his thought in polemical writings of Catholic theologians, and to a degree on citations of works of his followers in heresiologies. His principal works were his edition of the Bible, which consisted of a much edited version of the Pauline corpus (the Apostle) and the Gospel of Luke, and his Antitheses. The latter consisted not only of a series of sharply formulated contrasts between the teaching of the Old and New Testaments, but also, of an exposition of his canon, as is evident from Tertullian’s discussion in Marc.  and  (ANF . –; see Marc. .–; ANF . – for Tertullian’s discussion of Marcion’s views on Galatians which, sadly for us, tells us more about Tertullian than Marcion). Marcion set out to achieve ‘such a severance of the law from the gospel as should divide the Deity into two, nay, diverse gods – one for each Instrument, or Testament as it is more usual to call it; that by such means he might patronize belief in “the Gospel according to

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Introduction

the Antitheses”’, so at least Tertullian thought (Marc. .; ANF . ). The work certainly contained strikingly formulated antitheses contrasting the teaching of the two Testaments, but, as Marcion’s only literary work, it must also have been the source for Tertullian’s knowledge of Marcion’s exegetical writing (Aland : ), discussed in the commentary below. Marcion is guided in his preparation of an authoritative canon of Scripture for his church by his theological beliefs, which in turn are principally derived from his radical reading of Paul. There is a circular process at work here, in that Marcion’s understanding of Paul is based on his own version of Paul’s letters, which omitted the Pastorals and Hebrews (traditionally ascribed to Paul), that is to say, on a version from which he has already carefully removed what he sees as Jewish interpolations alien to Paul’s true gospel. Marcion would have argued, however, that this process is based on a historical understanding of the situation of the early church out of which the particular version of the texts which he received had arisen. His revision, that is to say, is based on his reading of Galatians  and  (May :  has suggested that Marcion took these two chapters as a kind of historical introduction to the Pauline corpus). Specifically, it is based on Paul’s account of his conflict with Peter, which he prefaces by distinguishing his gospel from the ‘other’ gospel, which is a perversion of his true gospel, Gal :–, . This perversion, Marcion believed, took the form of additions to the text of the genuine Pauline letters and to the true Gospel (of Luke) as well as of the creation of other Gospels altogether. This is a bold reading of Galatians  and , which offer Marcion only limited assistance in identifying what the original, as he supposes, uninterpolated form of the texts might have been. Such help as he derived from Galatians  and  appears to have come principally from Paul’s account of the nature of his dispute with Peter, specifically from Paul’s discussion of two kinds of righteousness in :, and only partly from the particular nature of the dispute about Law observance which was the occasion of the letter. What Paul opposes with such vehemence is the imposition of Law observance on his Gentile converts, and this clearly places a large question mark over the Law and, by extension, its author: why then the Law? This is clearly in principle grist to Marcion’s mill, but Paul’s arguments in (our) chapter  attempt to give a place to the Law in the overall plan of salvation in Christ, and perhaps not surprisingly our evidence suggests that Marcion omits the whole passage, :–, where this question is explicitly raised and discussed, as well as the earlier section, :–, about the faith and blessing promised to Abraham, which frames Paul’s account of the – albeit temporary – purpose of the Law. Tertullian omits any discussion of these passages in his treatment of chapter  (Marc. .; ANF . –). Jerome, probably following Origen, claims that Marcion omitted :–, but makes no specific comment about :– (PL .). Clearly, however, :, ‘Christ redeemed

Introduction



us from the curse of the Law, having become a curse for us’, was a key text for Marcion. The cross, for him, reveals the creator God as bloodthirsty, cruel and vengeful (PL .). This chimes in well with Marcion’s reading of Gal :, where Paul speaks of two kinds of righteousness. This text enabled him to distinguish between the God who is good and therefore just and the creator of the world, whose justice, because he lacks such compassionate goodness, necessarily turns into harshness, cruelty and, in consequence of his exclusive love for his chosen people, injustice (Harnack : –). A later fifth-century Marcionite source, which is cited in an Armenian heresiology by Eznik of Kolb, portrays the meeting of Christ and the creator of the world after Jesus’s crucifixion, where Jesus judges the creator on the basis of his own laws, which demand that those who shed the blood of a righteous man must shed their own blood. On this basis Jesus finds him worthy of death because ‘I am rightly more just than you and have performed many good deeds to your creatures’ (in Harnack : *). The difference between the two forms of righteousness is such that they require different authors. It is not possible to attribute them to the one God without implicating God in self-contradiction. Marcion’s ‘conception of the dignity of the summum bonum’ would not have allowed him to accept that the same God could have replaced the way of the Law by that of faith (Aland : , referring to Jaeger : –). The precise nature of this division between the two gods, their relation to one another, the sources of and influences on Marcion’s dualism are matters of considerable dispute (see e.g. Blackman , esp. –, where he argues for some Gnostic influence of a broad kind, though still maintaining that Marcion was ‘an exclusively Biblical theologian’, : x; May and Greschat , esp. Löhr ). It is clear that Marcion’s doctrine of two gods, his severe asceticism and his rejection of the Old Testament Law are all points where his beliefs come close to various forms of Gnosticism. On the other hand, he was clearly a biblical theologian, expending great efforts to establish an authoritative biblical text for his community. As Barbara Aland has argued (Aland : –), we should not construct too sharp a set of alternative categories for assessing Marcion: he was clearly someone for whom the Bible was of overriding importance and who based his teaching above all on Paul. There are indeed those who argue that Marcion was the first great Pauline interpreter, and that subsequent church interpretation of Paul had its origins in attempts to combat Marcion (Lindemann ). But equally, Marcion’s reading would have been influenced by and developed in dialogue with other contemporary forms of thought. This is far from saying that he simply imposed Gnostic forms of thought on Paul, but it is likely that he was concerned with questions about the dignity and constancy of God which are certainly raised by Paul’s notions of the temporary nature of the Law and which equally provoke church theologians like Irenaeus



Introduction

and Tertullian to offer a vigorous defence of the consistency of God’s actions throughout the history of salvation. Perhaps the greatest proof of the deeply biblical inspiration of Marcion’s theology is the fact that so many subsequent interpreters of Galatians were conscious of Marcion’s powerful and illuminating readings of Paul’s text, as they sought to plumb its often obscure arguments and metaphors. And one needs always to bear in mind that we hear him largely through the voices of his detractors. But, as Aland (: –) points out, there will have been elements in Galatians  which will have fed the deep roots of Marcion’s devotion to the cross. In Gal : Marcion changes ‘who loved me (agapēsantos)’ into ‘who bought me (agorasantos),’ and the theme of Christ’s death as the price for believers’ salvation recurs in Gal : and :. Christ must purchase men and women because they are so firmly in the power of the creator God, whose law leads them inescapably into sin (Gal :!) that they belong wholly to him. Tertullian taunts Marcion that for the ‘strange God’ to send his son to suffer at the hands of the creator God would be just as cruel as for the creator God to make his son suffer the curse which he himself had imposed (Marc. .; ANF .). Marcion must have argued that the good God of Jesus Christ did not curse and would not curse his son. Rather, his death is the price of his ‘new patience’ (Marc. .; ANF .), ‘the extreme expression of his non-demanding offer of goodness’, a view clearly articulated in the works of Syrian Marcionites. Such insights come not from engagement with Gnostic thought, but from a close reading of scriptural texts, and it is this which motivates Marcion and which gave his movement its power (see Aland : ). Finally, a word about Marcion’s text revision. We shall see in more detail in the commentary proper how Marcion has revised his text of Galatians, though this is an area fraught with difficulty, principally because we cannot be sure what text Marcion had received (Schmid ). The effect of this revision is clear, however. Marcion produced the first Christian canon, albeit a very restricted one consisting of his edited version of the Pauline epistles and of Luke’s Gospel, which was accepted as the sole authority within his church. In this way, ‘he was the first person in the history of Christianity to develop the concept of a closed, biblical canon with unique authority’ (Aland : ). This too is part of Galatians’ impact on the history of the church. That it was not based on a purely arbitrary reading of Galatians on Marcion’s part may be seen by considering similar moves made by Ernst Käsemann to identify a Pauline ‘canon within the canon’ (Käsemann , ; Schrage ).

Introduction



Augustine Augustine wrote his commentary on Galatians shortly before his ordination to the episcopate in North Africa in  or  (Plumer : –). It is his one continuous and complete commentary on a book of the Bible if one discounts his discourses on the Psalms as not strictly commentaries. As he writes, the Church is faced with new opportunities and new threats. Christianity is encouraged as the religion of the Empire, paganism is proscribed, and the church must deal with the new influx of former pagans. At the same time, the church has to meet challenges from both within and without. For Augustine in North Africa the problems are focused on the Manichees and the Donatists. The Manichees were members of a dualistic religious group founded by Mani in the third century, which spread from its origins in Babylon and southern Persia to North Africa and southern Europe in the fourth century. They taught a strict dualism, which distinguished two separate sources of being, light and darkness. They, like the Marcionites, looked to Paul for support. Augustine had been an adherent, a ‘hearer’ of the Manichees, but had abandoned their teaching in favour of Neo-platonist accounts of evil as a deficiency of goodness, privatio boni. He devoted much of his early literary work to attacks on Manichaeanism, and on his arrival in North Africa engaged in public debate with the local Manichaean priest, Fortunatus. The Donatists, by contrast, were a schismatic group whose origins lay in a disputed episcopal election in Carthage at the beginning of the fourth century. They were a martyr church with perfectionist tendencies, who had strong support from the Berber population and resisted all attempts at reconciliation or suppression. Galatians, which had provided strong support for Marcionite distinctions between a just and a good God, was also a text to which the Manichees appealed. In attacking Augustine’s view that the source of evil lay in the human heart and its covetousnessness, Fortunatus advanced the view that the human soul was constrained to sin by a ‘contrary nature’. It was not, that is to say, simply directed by its own evil choices or habits, but rather controlled by forces external to it of which its desire and cupidity were the effects, merely a small part of the evil which was universally spread thoughout the world. Fortunatus, that is to say, appealed to a sense of the prevalence of the evil in the world, very different from Augustine’s insistence on locating the source of all evil in the human will. In seeking Galatians’ backing for such views, he could clearly have appealed to texts like Gal :, with its talk of ‘this present evil age’, as well as to the strongly dualist anthropology of :– which he cites immediately after the passage just summarized (Fort. ). It was therefore important for Augustine to provide alternative, Catholic readings of Galatians. Similarly, as we have seen, the account of the conflict between Peter and Paul at Antioch had provided Marcion with his picture of a ‘true’, Pauline church and a church



Introduction

perverted by the false apostles. Augustine needed to be similarly on his guard against readings of the narrative in Galatians  and  which could lend support to Donatist doctrines which divided the church into a pure martyr church on the one hand and a church of the apostates and sinners on the other. These are issues which Augustine will deal with painfully and at great length during his episcopate, arguing for a doctrine of the sinfulness of the church on earth and the holiness of the church of the elect which will be revealed at the end of time. His discussion of the believer’s struggle to perform works of righteousness in Gal :– will provide an important plank in the development of such views. Augustine did not write his commentary without literary precedent. While the writing of biblical commentaries in Greek went back at least as far as Origen in the third century, in Latin such commentaries appeared only in the second half of the fourth century. Marius Victorinus, professor of rhetoric at Rome and a late convert to Christianity, probably produced the first, c., followed by ‘Ambrosiaster’, then Jerome, whose commentary was written c.. There is reasonable evidence to show that Augustine would have known Victorinus’s commentary (Plumer : –; Cooper : –); Augustine not only knew Jerome’s work but engaged in a lengthy correspondence in which he challenged Jerome’s views about the nature of the conflict at Antioch (White ). Victorinus, Jerome and Augustine were all men who had an extensive knowledge of and grounding in ancient classical culture. Augustine refers in On Christian Teaching (written shortly after his commentary on Galatians) to those who have spoiled the Egyptians of their treasures of wisdom, ‘studies for liberated minds which are more appropriate to the service of the truth, and some very useful moral instruction, as well as the various truths about monotheism to be found in their writers’. All of this may be ‘accepted and kept for conversion to Christian purposes’. And this is what Christians like Cyprian and, among others, Victorinus have done (Augustine : ). Plumer comments: ‘This suggests that Augustine sees himself as the heir and champion of a tradition, a tradition replacing the ancient alliance of paganism and classical culture by a Christian culture centred on Scripture’ (Plumer : –). Interestingly, Augustine does not mention Jerome, whose commentary, which owes a great deal to Origen, is a repository of great learning, gathering a wide variety of views from biblical and classical sources to illustrate the meaning of the text. By contrast, neither Victorinus nor Augustine, both of whom would engage in dialogue with classical learning and philosophy in their theological treatises, favours this form of variorum commentary when it comes to expounding Galatians. Victorinus, followed in all likelihood by Augustine, preferred the form of commentatio simplex, a single continuous exposition of the text, whose emphasis is on communicating the author’s understanding rather than seeking to establish it over against other readings, or indeed simply displaying the

Introduction



diversity of interpretations to which the text is amenable (Plumer : ). This would serve Augustine’s need to provide clear instruction and encouragement to the Catholic church in North Africa and to engage in vigorous polemic against its opponents, both Manichees and Donatists. Augustine’s commentary on Galatians has not always had a very favourable reception. Lightfoot, whose account of patristic commentaries on Galatians is a valuable source of information (Lightfoot : –), laments that Augustine, while endowed with great spiritual insight, was wanting in ‘the critical faculty’, and that for this reason, ‘as a continuous commentator he is disappointing’. Admittedly, he is more scathing about Victorinus, whose work he describes as ‘obscure, confused, and as an exposition almost worthless’. By contrast, he heaps lavish, if somewhat barbed praise on Jerome: ‘Though abounding in fanciful and perverse interpretations, violations of good taste and good feeling, faults of all kinds, this is nevertheless the most valuable of all the patristic commentaries on the Epistle to the Galatians: for the faults are more than redeemed by extensive learning, acute criticism, and lively vigorous exposition’ (: –). In at least one very important respect, however, Augustine shows himself a good deal more critically minded than Jerome. As we have already seen, the Marcionites had used the account of Peter and Paul’s conflict at Antioch to construct an account of Christianity with two poles: the true Pauline church and the false teachers with their adulterated Gospels and Pauline texts. Such constructions of the earliest history of the church not only provided support to groups like the Manichees, they also undermined attempts to construct a contrary version of church history, as essentially the story of a united church with only occasional aberrations which were to be vigorously discouraged. Jerome, by contrast, argued that the ‘conflict’ between the two apostles was not a real dispute, but merely a stratagem agreed between them to persuade the Jewish Christians to remain in the faith (PL .–). It is clear that Jerome’s view, which he took over from Origen and which was, as we shall see, also advocated by Chrysostom, paved the way for a Christianity which would be intolerant of diversity and difference and would propagate an ideal of a doctrinal homogeneity which would rarely if ever be achieved. In this latter respect, it is interesting to recall the fact that within ten years and a few hundred miles of each other Jerome, Augustine and Chrysostom would offer readings of Galatians which would, variously, feed three very different forms of Christianity: Eastern Orthodoxy, Lutheranism and Roman Catholicism. Galatians was itself a source of rich diversity, as this commentary will seek to show. Augustine challenged this harmonizing view of the conflict at Antioch, even though he must have been perfectly well aware of the ways in which Pauline Christianity could be co-opted by heterodox groups and played off against Catholic Christianity and that he was therefore in a measure playing into the



Introduction

hands of groups like the Marcionites and the Manichees. Nevertheless, there was more at stake for Augustine than ecclesiastical conformity; the whole basis of scriptural authority would be challenged if Paul were shown not merely to have dissembled to the people at Antioch but also to have misrepresented the nature of the dispute when he wrote to the Galatians in order to make his case for non-observance of the Law. For then Scripture would be based on a lie, and its authority fatally undermined (ep. ..; see Plumer : ). Augustine may not have enjoyed the same philological skills as Jerome, or have considered the same range of views about the letter, but he had the ability to think through the theological implications of his ‘simple’ exposition and so lay the foundations for later theological readings, not least Aquinas’s and Luther’s. Plumer has argued persuasively that this is above all a teaching and a pastoral commentary (Plumer : –). That is right insofar as it is essentially expository in form, not much given to scholarly argument. It is shown in his concern for the proper administration of discipline within the church and within his monastic community (see the extensive commentary on :) and on the virtue of humility. But it is more than pastoral in the way in which it wrestles with the problems which had already been raised, by mainstream and marginal groups alike, in relation to the letter: questions of the relation of the Law on the one hand and faith and grace on the other, questions about the consistency and constancy of God’s actions and purposes raised by Paul’s talk of two kinds of righteousness and of the end of the Law, questions about the role of the human will in the life of the Spirit and of the continuing presence of sin within the church (a matter of great concern for the Donatists). Even at the relatively straightforward level at which he writes here, Augustine is working hard to clarify the nature of the Christian understanding of the world, of human error and fallibility, of the possibilities and limits of human restoration and regeneration, of the interrelation of human and divine action. It is in this sense that Augustine is laying the foundations of a new culture: not by engaging in dispute with classical philosophy (which he had been doing with his friends in Cassiciacum; Brown : –) but by trying to construct for the rapidly expanding church a cosmology and an ethos with roots deep in Scripture. This is not so much classical exposition of Paul’s meaning in the letter as an attempt to expound the letter in such a way as to allow it to inform a coherent view of the Christian faith. Maybe this is why it, and Victorinus’s commentary before it, interested Lightfoot so little.

John Chrysostom John Chrysostom wrote his commentary on Galatians during the time of his priesthood in Antioch on the Orontes, before his move to Constantinople and

Introduction



his ill-fated episcopacy in that city. John had been born in Antioch c. (Kelly : –) to well-to-do parents. He received his education in Antioch, probably completing his studies under the pagan rhetorician Libanius. At about this time, he was baptized. The Christian church in Antioch was divided by the doctrinal disputes following the Council of Nicaea. John was baptized by Meletius, the pro-Nicene bishop (there were altogether three bishops), who spent most of the first years of his episcopate in exile. Chrysostom soon came under the influence of Diodore, a prominent ascetic teacher. Some four years later (c.) he became a lector within Meletius’s church and then left the city to lead the ascetic life of a monk in the surrounding mountains. For four years he lived a communal existence, marked by long silent meditations and communal worship, shared tasks and a simple daily meal. Two further years were spent in a more radical form of asceticism in a cave in the mountains by himself, where he learnt the Old and New Testaments by heart, slept little, and, on his own account, did not lie down for the whole time. This, not surprisingly, had long term negative effects on his health. It was probably ill health which prompted Chrysostom to return to the city c. (Kelly : ), where he was ordained deacon and subsequently priest (c.). By the time of his return, the political situation had changed, and the Nicene faith was being proclaimed vigorously as the faith of the Empire. Meletius had returned finally from exile and, for a time, united the church in Antioch around the Nicene faith. Chrysostom remained in Antioch until his move to Constantinople, working closely with Meletius to establish the faith in the city until the latter’s death at the Council of Constantinople in . As Robert Wilken has argued, the culture of the city was complex. The church was divided, many of its members regarding the Nicene faith as an unbiblical innovation. The fabric of society was still largely formed by the ancient pagan culture, not least in respect of its educational institutions, witness Chrysostom’s education by Libanius. There was also a large Jewish population, with which some years earlier the Emperor Julian had formed a rather unusual alliance in his attempts to restore paganism (Meeks and Wilken : –; Wilken : –). The Christians in Antioch enjoyed a strangely ambiguous relationship with the Jews: they both attacked them and their buildings and at the same time were strongly attracted to their rites and ceremonies. Chrysostom wrote a series of homilies against those so attracted (Chrysostom ) which contain a fierce polemic against the Jews themselves. John’s commentary on the Galatians is however remarkably free of such language, which was a potent source of anti-Semitic rhetoric. In this way the newly recognized church of Meletius in Antioch faced many challenges: it had to show itself capable of uniting the Christians in that city, and indeed throughout the Empire. It had to establish itself as a cultural force which could replace the old institutions and



Introduction

customs of the ancient world. It had constantly to guard itself against division and against the competing claims of the Jews. It is not too difficult to see the kind of challenges which, in turn, the interpretation of Galatians posed to Chrysostom. Viewed in the light of the divisions which had recently plagued the church in Antioch, the story of Paul’s conflict with Peter in their very own city was one which would clearly require careful treatment. It might on the one hand seem comforting to recall that even the apostles could fall out, but on the other hand drawing attention to the existence of divisions even among the founding fathers of this new religious community would hardly commend it as a source of unity for the Empire. Again, Galatians might seem to offer support to Chrysostom in view of the fact that the conflict which Paul addressed in his letter was very close to one of the issues which threatened to unsettle the church at Antioch. Paul’s opponents were Judaizing Christians, just like those whom Chrysostom castigated in his homilies; Paul’s rejection of such a position must have spoken directly to John. He could readily embrace Paul’s affirmation of the reality of the new life in the Spirit and echo his astonishment that the Galatians should wish to return to a religion of law. But, on the other hand, he, like all the Fathers, had to be cautious not to stress the newness of their faith to such a degree that they fell into a position which was more or less Marcionite, or which indeed seemed to scorn the roots of Christianity in the sacred writings which the Christians shared with the Jews. But these were again problems very similar to those with which Paul had also had to wrestle, and his subtle but by no means unambiguous text would provide Chrysostom with the basis for developing some carefully nuanced arguments of his own. These were all issues which engaged Chrysostom in his commentary, but which by no means dominate his treatment. In the end, it is more Paul’s wrestling to express the radical newness of the faith which he proclaims, rather than his resistance to attempts to draw it back into the old mould of Judaism with which he has parted company, which claims Chrysostom’s attention. It is Paul giving expression to the new creation which has come about through the death and resurrection of Christ and the leading of the Spirit which lies at the heart of Chrysostom’s exposition. And as Margaret Mitchell () has powerfully argued, it is Paul seen through the eyes of an ascetic monk. Thus, in his commentaries, homilies and discourses, Chrysostom is fashioning a new culture to replace the classical culture of antiquity. And just as the old culture was based on the interpretation and cultivation of classical literature, Homer, the Tragedians, Plato and Aristotle, so the new culture is based on the interpretation and preaching of the Bible. In this task Chrysostom was not in any sense an innovator: he stood at the end of a process some three centuries old, running through Christian writers from the Apologists, through Origen and other Antiochene writers such as

Introduction



Theodore of Mopsuestia, Chrysostom’s contemporary, and like him a student of Libanius. It is often said that the Antiochene school pursued a form of historical exegesis, as opposed to the allegorical approach of the Alexandrians, such as Origen. However, as Frances Young has argued (Young : –; : –), this is in many ways misleading. In the first place, it should not be thought that Origen was uninterested in the literal form and meaning of the text. He was in his own right an important text critic. But he insisted that the literal or corporeal meaning of the text was of much less importance than its spiritual meaning, and this was indeed to be sought, not least through the use of allegory to squeeze meaning out of what might otherwise appear to be insignificant details in the text. In this way the deeper meaning which he discovered could be remarkably unrelated to the overall argument or intention of the text. It was part of the Antiochene response to this kind of arbitrary derivation of meaning from details taken largely out of context to stress the importance of the skopos or hypothesis of the text: its argument or overall message. They would do this by providing summaries and paraphrases of the argument and, as indeed Origen would also have done, by careful investigation of the meaning of obscure words and phrases. It is in this sense that they can be said to interpret the texts historically. Such an emphasis was a protest ‘against esoteric philosophical deductions being made in what they regarded as an arbitrary way’ (Young : ). But this was no modern historical critical form of enquiry: they were interested in piecing together the narrative of the books they were reading, not in a critical reconstruction of events for which such books might be (part of the) evidence. And in arguing as they did, they were drawing on rhetorical methods which were taken directly from classical culture, in which Chrysostom and Theodore had received a distinguished education. It was this which above all equipped them for their task in creating a new culture: What happened as the Church conquered the Roman world was the substitution of the scriptures for the classical repertoire made up of Homer and the dramatists. People like the Cappadocian Fathers in the fourth century and John Chrysostom, the ‘Golden-mouthed’ preacher of the early fifth century, communicated the content of the Bible as rhetoricians had communicated the old stories and poetry of antiquity. Biblical characters became heroes celebrated in panegyrics, displaying the classical virtues. Rhetoric, just like drama, aimed to create response, to stimulate the feelings and emotions of the audience. It was the art of persuasion. (Young : )

In all this, Chrysostom and his fellows, it hardly needs to be said, were pursuing the same task as Augustine in his exposition of the Scriptures. So what kind of new world did Chrysostom conjure up as he engaged with



Introduction

Paul’s text? It was, first, a world which offered new wisdom and guidance to any who sought it. The old law of the old covenant was merely a preliminary stage in the education of all; the new dispensation of the Spirit was as far superior to the Law as were the teachings of a sophisticated philosopher to those of an elementary schoolteacher. And, so Chrystostom taught, such teaching could be followed successfully. The Spirit so instructed people that they could distinguish between the good and the bad and do the good (see on Gal :; ANF .). But such ‘walking in the Spirit’ was possible only for those who had both been reborn in the waters of baptism and also continually ‘crucified the flesh’ in a life of disciplined asceticism, exemplified for Chrysostom by Paul himself. In such a life of mortifying human desires, the fleshly desires are gradually stripped of their power at the same time as the objects of such desires become less and less attractive. The church was thus a school of faith for those who had been reborn in the waters of baptism and were led by the Spirit. Those within its doors had, however, to submit to the discipline of its teaching, here powerfully exemplified in the figure of the ‘golden-mouthed’ orator, John. And this teaching ultimately took its lead from the experience of those who had followed the way of the cross trodden by Paul, the monks and indeed Chrysostom himself. There is an interesting tension here between Chrysostom’s emphasis on the need for sacramental rebirth, with its implication that the former life was one so hopelessly flawed that only a radical new beginning would avail, and his understanding of the Christian life as one of instruction, discipline and application. On the one hand, it is only when the will has been restored in baptism that the soul can embark on the divine paideia, instruction, which will prepare it for immortality and the resurrected life. On the other, even within the life of the reborn, there are still unruly desires to be combatted and quenched: the reborn soul, even though it is endowed with the strength of will to resist the desires of the flesh, still needs to combat and overcome them. Perhaps this accounts for the tension within Eastern Orthodoxy between, on the one hand, the close identity which often exists/existed between church and state, led by a Christian ruler, exemplified by Byzantium and Holy Russia, and on the other, the church of the monks and the staretz, which would all too often find itself in conflict with a court burdened with worldly power and wealth. Certainly this was a conflict which Chrysostom himself endured when he moved from Antioch to Constantinople and criticized the wealth and extravagance of the court.

Thomas Aquinas Thomas Aquinas was born in  in the mainland region of the kingdom of Sicily, the son of a Lombard-Norman nobleman. He was educated at the abbey

Introduction



school in Monte Cassino and at the University of Naples. While at Naples he joined the newly formed Order of the Dominicans, who sent him to Cologne to study under Albertus Magnus. In  he started teaching as an extern in Paris, lecturing on Scripture and Peter Lombard’s Sentences; he was admitted as a master and appointed to one of the principal divinity chairs in . His inaugural lecture discusses the theologian’s role in the communication of divine wisdom; his second lecture was in praise of Holy Scripture. In  he was appointed theological adviser and lecturer to the papal court. In  he was recalled to Paris to defend the friars against attack by those who objected to their position outside normal church structures and to mount a defence against Averroism, the doctrine that there were two kinds of truth, philosophical and theological, which could be in contradiction with each other without detriment to religious faith. In , he moved to Naples to teach; he died in  on his way to the Council of Lyons. Aquinas’s situation is clearly very different from that of Chrysostom. Rather than standing on the brink of a new age for the church, where it needed to equip itself to fulfil a new socio-cultural role in the emerging Christian Empire, Aquinas was born into a Europe where the church and Christian faith had for centuries been closely interwoven with all aspects of society and government. Medieval Western Europe had a common language, common political institutions, a network of universities and schools, such that a scholar of the status of Aquinas could move easily from one country to another, and a common form of religious belief and association, the Catholic church. Such unity was impressive: it was by no means to be taken for granted. The s had seen the gap between Western and Eastern Christianity widen to breaking point. Within the West new challenges to the church’s official teaching and practice threatened: the Cathars/Albigensians developed a form of Christianity with interesting similarities to that of the Manichees and the Marcionites. They did so by interpreting Scripture in creative and certainly non-standard ways. The Waldensians, followers of Valdes, a rich layman from Lyons, sold their goods, distributed them to the poor, and devoted themselves to preaching, directed principally against the Cathars, though also, as they felt the growing weight of official church disapproval and condemnation, against the abuses of the church. Theirs was a life based on the Scriptures, selections of which had been translated for Valdes. Official condemnation clearly rendered the Waldensians unsuitable as defenders of the official church’s faith; the two orders of friars founded at the beginning of the thirteenth century, that of Francis () and that of Dominic (), were a far more effective force and were supported by the Pope. At the same time they were suspected by the secular clergy and by the monks. There were other, intellectual challenges: from his early days at the University in Naples, where translations of Aristotle from Arabic and Greek



Introduction

were circulating, Aquinas had been exposed to the teachings of Aristotle and to the works of his Muslim interpreters, Ibn Sina (Avicenna, –) and Ibn Rushd (Averroës, –). This was the time of vigorous intellectual debate over the nature of being in which Christian, Muslim and Jewish (Maimonides, –) scholars engaged (Gilby ; Kerr ). At the same time, different readings of Aristotle by Christian philosophers and theologians would lead to further controversy in the schools of Western Europe. Aquinas’s writing reflects all these moments in thirteenth-century European culture. From the start of his teaching career, he was engaged in the regular interpretation of Sacred Scripture. His first post as a baccalarius biblicus at Cologne would have involved him in ‘cursory’ reading of the biblical texts with students, providing brief expositions. On his arrival at Paris he would probably have advanced to the status of baccalarius sententiarum, producing a commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, the text which had been appointed for theological training at the Fourth Lateran Council in . Only after producing his commentary on the Sentences would he have advanced to the position of magister in sacra pagina (master of the sacred page). This, and the title doctor sacrae scripturae, makes it clear how far the study of theology was seen to depend centrally on the understanding of the Bible. Alongside his regular exposition of the Bible, he would produce a stream of treatments of Christian doctrine, culminating in the Summa theologiae, at which he worked in the last seven years of his life; as well as a series of commentaries on Aristotle and writings aimed at combatting misunderstandings of Aristotle among European scholars. The dating of Aquinas’s lectures on the Pauline epistles has been the subject of much controversy: for our purposes it is sufficient to say that Aquinas lectured on the Bible throughout his teaching career, that the lectures on Paul date in the first instance to one of his periods of lecturing in Italy, possibly in Rome from  to , and that we owe the text of the lectura on Galatians to the reportatio made by his assistant, Reginald of Piperno. Aquinas treated Paul’s epistles (which, for him, included the Pastoral Epistles and Hebrews) as a whole, seeing them, in his Prologue to the whole series, as setting out Paul’s teaching on the subject of grace: Hebrews treats of Christ as the Head of the mystical body of the church; the Pastorals treat of grace as it is in the ‘principal members of the church’, the prelates; the remaining epistles treat of grace as it is in the church itself. Within this section, the epistle to the Romans treats of grace as it is in itself, the epistles to the Corinthians treat of the sacraments of grace, while in the epistle to the Galatians ‘are found excluded superfluous sacraments (superflua sacramenta) against those who wish to add the ancient sacraments to new ones (vetera sacramenta ad novis adiungere)’ (Torrell : –). This somewhat sketchy outline, while it undoubtedly reflects Aquinas’s central concern

Introduction



with the way in which the believer is transformed in the church by grace, belies, however, the richness of topics treated in his commentaries. Aquinas, like all his contemporaries, was heavily indebted to Augustine’s biblical theology. While, as we shall see, Augustine was a careful reader of texts and certainly concerned to follow the line of Paul’s argument in his letters, he was also capable of considerable flights of allegorizing fantasy, and this had fed a rich later tradition of such treatment of the biblical texts. More recent developments in the study of the Bible and the growing interest in Aristotle, whose writings presented a very different metaphysics and epistemology from those of Plato, on whom Augustine largely relied, prepared the ground for Aquinas’s very different approach to Galatians. Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages was above all the province of the monks, who practised a form of lectio divina, a contemplative reading of Scripture, by which, immersing themselves in the text, they could penetrate behind the surface meanings to the spiritual sense which underlay them. Plato had seen the world of sensible perceptions as images of eternal realities or ‘Ideas’; in the same way, the literal sense of Scripture was a pointer to the true spiritual meanings of the text, its allegorical (linking the Old Testament to the New), anagogical (relating to the text to the believer’s progress towards heaven) and tropological (moral) senses (Smalley : –). A major break with this tradition occurred with the emergence of the friars in the thirteenth century, though they have important precursors, as Smalley has documented. She has also provided an excellent summary of Aquinas’s debt to Aristotle and the way it influences his understanding of the sense of Scripture: The Aristotelian held that substance could only be known through its sensible manifestations. In adapting Aristotle to Christianity, St. Thomas united soul and body much more closely than the Augustinians had done. The soul is the form of the body, present in all its parts, acquiring knowledge through the senses, not through innate ideas. Its dependence on body ceases to be a penance or hard necessity, and becomes ‘proper’ to it. . . . Transferring his view of body and soul to ‘letter and spirit’, the Aristotelian would perceive the ‘spirit’ of Scripture as something not hidden behind or added on to, but expressed by the text. We cannot disembody a man in order to investigate his soul; neither can we understand the Bible by distinguishing letter from spirit and making a separate study of each. (Smalley : –)

Thus, for Aquinas, it is the text as a whole which has to be studied for its literal meaning, whether that is communicated through straight description or figure and metaphor. What is important is what the writer intended to say by the words he wrote. In this connection, it is worth noting Aquinas’s comment that the book that he preferred to the whole town of Paris was Chrysostom’s commentary on Matthew. The spiritual meaning for Aquinas relates to the



Introduction

events which the sacred writers describe. They speak through words; God speaks through events. ‘The literal sense of Scripture, therefore, is what the human author expressed by his words; the spiritual senses are what the divine author expressed by the events which the human author related’ (Smalley : ). Aquinas, we have seen, believed that the main subject of Paul’s letters was grace. His Summa Theologiae was organized around the same central theological topic: the believer’s progress to beatitude, to participation in the divine nature through God’s grace in Christ. His treatment of this topic forms the second part of the Summa, which is framed by, first, the treatise on God (prima pars) and, to conclude, the treatment of Jesus Christ, the God-man who initiates the new creation (tertia pars) (Kerr : ). It is not difficult to see how the commentary on Galatians could provide food for reflection on such themes. Quite apart from the question of the unity of God, which is raised by Marcionite and dualist (Cathar) readings of the epistle, it is the theme of new life which Aquinas emphasizes in his prologue to the Galatians commentary. Taking a text from Leviticus, :, ‘the new coming on, you shall cast away the old’, he indicates four areas where the old must be set aside: the old error is removed by the doctrine of Christ; the figure of the Old Testament is made new by ‘the newness of grace or the reality of Christ’s presence’; the old guilt is renewed by the newness of justice; the old punishment will be made new by the newness of glory, concerning which Isaiah (:) states: ‘Behold I will create a new heaven and a new earth.’ The theme of new creation also provides the closing summary of the letter, with its strong links to the notion of the new law of the Spirit and the renewing power of faith working through love (:). This becomes for Aquinas one of the central texts which explicates the notion of grace as transformative of the life of the believer, and for the Thomist tradition the key text with which to oppose Lutheran notions of justification by faith alone. Therefore, faith informed by charity is the new creature. For we have been created and made to exist in our nature (esse naturae) through Adam, but that creature is already old. Therefore, the Lord in producing us and establishing us in the existence of grace (esse gratiae) has made a new creature: ‘That we might be some beginning of his creature’ (Jas :). And it is called ‘new’, because by it we are reborn into a new life by the Holy Spirit – ‘Thou shalt send forth thy spirit and they shall be created: and thou shalt renew the face of the earth’ (Ps :) – and by the Cross of Christ: ‘If then any be in Christ a new creature, the old things are passed away, behold all things are made new’ ( Cor :). In this way, then, by a new creature, i.e., by the faith of Christ and the charity of God which has been poured out in our hearts, we are made new and joined to Christ. (: –; : )

Introduction



This raises important theological and anthropological questions about the relation of the old esse naturae and the new esse gratiae. Aquinas’s Aristotelian anthropology is brought into play. For Aquinas, we noticed, the soul is the form of the body: that is to say, it is not a form separate from the form of the body itself (as a non-rational body might have an animal form); rather, the soul informs all aspects our existence, not only our rational part but also our physical part. What changes in the new state of grace is that the soul is now set between God and the body: ‘the body, indeed was vivified and moved by the soul of Paul, but his soul by Christ. Hence as to the life of the flesh, Paul himself lived and this is what he says, namely, and that I now live in the flesh, i.e. by the life of the flesh; but as to his relation to God, Christ lived in Paul’ (commenting on :; : ; : ). This sense of a hierarchy within the life of faith is equally to be found in his treatment of desire in :: natural desires form a proper part of our new being in Christ; they are wrong only in so far as they are overindulged and distract us from spiritual desires. Grace perfects nature; it renews it, but does not destroy it. What then of the Law? In the Summa and in his theological works generally, Aquinas distinguishes three forms of law: the natural law, the Law of the Old Testament and the law of the New Testament. The Law of the Old Testament relates to the law of the New like a partial remedy to a complete one: ‘The effective putting down of crime and the enforcement of sanctions suffices for human law, but not for divine law, which would adapt the whole of man to everlasting joy. Only the grace of the Spirit can do this, the grace by which love is shed abroad in our hearts’ (ST a–ae, q. , , trans. in Gilby : ). Thus, when considering the purpose of the Old Testament Law in his commentary on Galatians, Aquinas takes Paul’s statement ‘it was set because of transgressions’ in : to mean that the Law was given to deal with the consequences of sin. These were outlined by Bede as ‘wickedness, weakness, passion and ignorance’ (: ; : ) and Aquinas outlines four purposes that the law fulfilled corresponding to each of these. The Law was there to restrain wickedness, to reveal humanity’s weakness, to ‘tame the concupiscence of a wanton people, so that, worn out by various ceremonies, they would not fall into idolatry or lewdness’! Fourthly, as ‘a shadow of the good things to come’ (Heb :), the law was given as a figure of future grace to instruct the ignorant (: ; : ). Christians however walk in the Spirit, which is to say, ‘under the rule and guidance of the Holy Spirit’, who reveals to us knowledge of our supernatural end. Not only that but by instilling into us habits of virtue, he inclines us and ‘stirs up the affections to right willing’. This is the ‘law’ of the New Testament, the ‘law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus which has delivered us from the law of sin and death’ (Rom :; : ; : ). There can be no need, that is to say, for law in the strict sense, when the soul of the believer is informed by the Spirit of Christ.



Introduction

Martin Luther Martin Luther’s reading of Galatians is the fruit of his struggle for an evangelical understanding of Paul’s letter which lasted from the midpoint of the second decade of the sixteenth century right through to his death. The commentary which we will examine is based on his  lectures, subsequently lightly revised (). This was translated into English and published in . Luther had lectured on Galatians first in /, and these earlier lectures were published in . It is the later lectures however which had the greatest influence. Luther was born in Eisleben in , entered the Arts Faculty in Erfurt in , gained his Master’s degree in  and proceeded to the study of law. On  July  he was caught in a violent storm near Stotternheim, vowed to become a monk and entered the monastery of the Augustinian Friars in Erfurt  days later. He was ordained a priest in  and began to take an active part in the affairs of the monastery; in / he accompanied to Rome the brother who would represent the views of their Observant congregation in a dispute which had arisen over plans to unite them with a congregation of conventual or ‘lax’ Augustines. Shortly thereafter he was moved to Wittenberg, graduated as doctor of theology in , and took over the Chair of Biblical Theology from his friend and mentor Johann von Staupitz, the Vicar-General of the German Congregation of Augustinian Friars. Whereas until this time he had given courses on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, he could now choose his topics and lectured regularly on books of the Bible, the Psalms (–), Romans (–), Galatians (–), Hebrews (–), and then again Psalms (–). He returned to Galatians again in . His classes met at  a.m. on Mondays and Fridays (Oberman ; Pauck ). Clearly Luther’s situation differs greatly from that of any of his predecessors. By the time his / lectures were published in , he had already come through the first shock of his confrontation with Rome over indulgences, and was now the acknowledged leader of a movement spreading through North European cities at remarkable speed. By  he had faced not only a fully-fledged attack on his position by the Catholic church (in the persons of Cajetan and Eck) and all the ambiguities of the Peasants’ Revolt, but was also having to grapple with the growing fragmentation in the Reformation camp itself. Luther dismisses a very diverse collection of other-minded figures and groups as Schwärmer (enthusiasts), principally because they claimed to enjoy the influence of the Holy Spirit independently of their reading of Holy Scripture. It is this claim to such unmediated reception of the Holy Spirit that leads Luther to link figures as diverse as the revolutionary Thomas Müntzer, the puritanical Karlstadt, and the mystical Schwenkfeld and Frank (Watson : –).

Introduction



Luther had also to consider the challenges facing the Protestant churches about how to use their new-found freedom. The Reformation, whose ideas were rapidly propagated through the pamphlets (Flugblätter) produced by the new printing presses, struck a rich chord among the citizens of towns like his own Wittenberg (Dickens ). Luther’s Law-free Gospel of justification by faith, with its emphasis on the Christian’s faith as solely responsible for his/ her salvation, seriously weakened the power of the medieval church. In particular, it challenged the church’s position as a broker of divine grace; that was now a matter between the individual and God. Justification was God’s free gift, which required for its reception nothing but the believer’s trusting acceptance. But where the power of the church was broken in this way, the question of Law would return with a vengeance. How were discipline, law and order to be maintained alongside evangelical freedom in the cities which espoused the new teaching, once the spiritual and moral authority of the Catholic church was broken? For Luther, the Law retained its theological function of convicting the sinner and driving him or her to Christ. It had, too, a continuing political function, legitimating the prince’s use of the sword, on whose protection his churches were largely dependent. But such civil power, though a necessary means of restraint in a sixteenth-century city, was not of itself a sufficient guarantee of civic industry and harmony. For Calvin, as we shall see, the answer was to proclaim a further (third) use of the Law alongside its theological purpose of driving sinners to Christ and its political or civil use: namely, its continuing role in instructing and goading Christians’ into action. Luther was reluctant to give such authority to the Law, and his restriction of its uses to its theological and its civil senses might seem to have separated the secular realm of the governance from the inner world of the Christian’s conscience, concerned principally with the soul’s salvation. But while the privatization of religion, to which this disjunction can easily lead, has always dogged the Lutheran tradition, it would be wrong to see this as an inevitable outcome of Luther’s teaching on the Law and his – complementary – doctrine of the two kingdoms. This would scarcely account for the social dynamism of the Lutheran churches. Luther’s emphasis on vocation, on the believer’s service of God in the world in his/her particular callings, whether in church, state or commerce (Wingren ), released great social energy, as it gave dignity and worth to societal roles which had been undervalued in relation to those of the celibate clergy and monks. Such matters, which are treated at length in Luther’s Galatians commentary, are nonetheless all secondary to the driving thrust of the work, which returns again and again to the question of the fear of judgement. The principal freedom of the Christian from which all other political and social freedoms flow is freedom from fear of eternal destruction and punishment: ‘Nor are we dealing with political freedom. No, we are dealing with another kind, which the devil



Introduction

hates and attacks most bitterly. This is the freedom with which Christ has set us free, not from some human slavery or tyrannical authority but from the eternal wrath of God. Where? In the conscience’ (WA /, ; quoted in Betz : v; LW .). The only release from such fear lies in the acceptance of the evangelical message of God’s free gift of righteousness, purchased/acquired by Christ’s death and experienced by the believer as Christ’s indwelling in him, and it is to this that Luther turns whenever he is beset by doubts and fears. This is brought out well in a passage from a letter to Spenlein written in : Therefore, my sweet brother, learn Christ and him crucified: learn to pray to him, despairing of yourself, saying: Thou Lord Jesus art my righteousness, but I am thy sin: thou hast taken on thyself what thou wast not, and hast given me what I was not. Beware of aspiring to such purity that you will not wish to seem to yourself, or to be a sinner. For Christ dwells only in sinners. For that reason he . . . descended from heaven that he might dwell among sinners. (quoted in Rupp : –)

As Karin Bornkamm has argued, for Luther the ideas of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to the believer and the believer’s union with him were integrally connected. In the  commentary Christ’s giving himself for us is described as the work of God’s dignity and charity in us. Belief in Christ’s work makes the believer just and makes Christ dwell, live and reign in him (WA /; LW .). For those who believe in Christ, the Law of the Decalogue has been fulfilled; but if one considers his concrete existence – his flesh – then he is a sinner. This leads directly to Luther’s formulation: simul iustus et peccator (WA /; LW .–). There is a double alienation at work here: ‘considered according to the flesh, man stands under the alien sin of Adam; from the point of view of faith, he is just through the alien justice of Christ.’ But again, Luther can speak about the believer’s justice in terms of something in process of realization. The believer is just, ‘not yet in reality (in re) but in hope (in spe)’ (WA /; LW .). Full justice is an eschatological goal; Christians must carry on the fight against sin their whole life long. This in turn is closely linked to the notion of the believer’s union with Christ (Gal :). Christ indwells the believer by faith and instils grace, through which it comes about that man is ruled not by himself but by Christ’s spirit (WA /; LW .). ‘The justice to which man is conjoined in justification is the origin of his own becoming just, which is now commencing. Sanctification is inaugurated by the event of justification itself ’ (Bornkamm : ). Luther returns to this theme again and again in his  commentary. It is central to all that he stands for that righteousness, the believer’s justice, is a gift from God. In his later Preface to his Latin Writings (LW .–), he will relate how as a young man he struggled with the scholastic understanding of the phrase ‘the

Introduction



righteousness of God’ as the formal or active righteousness of God, i.e. the justice which is determinative of God’s actions, by which he punishes the unjust sinner. He learnt, from a close reading of Rom :, that what is meant here is the ‘passive righteousness with which merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written “He who through faith is righteous shall live”’. But such emphasis on the gift to sinners of God’s righteousness does not mean that such a gift is without effects in the believer’s life. As Luther continues in this passage: ‘Thereupon I ran through the Scriptures from memory. I also found in other terms an analogy, as, the work of God, that is, what God does in us, the power of God, with which he makes us strong, the wisdom of God, with which he makes us wise, the strength of God, the salvation of God, the glory of God.’ Against any attempt to see righteousness as something which the believer can achieve or earn/merit, Luther reacts with the greatest vehemence, and castigates all those – philosophers, schoolmen, monks, Turks, Jews – who, in his view seek to find such justification for themselves. But, against those who see the believer’s justification as a purely imputed righteousness, something which produces neither effects nor fruit, Luther protests with equal vehemence. How could it be that faith, which leads to the union between the believer and Christ, to Christ’s indwelling the believer’s soul, should be without effect in the life of the believer? As his passionate treatment of the idea of the new creation/creature in : makes abundantly clear, the new creature, whereby the image of God is renewed, is not made by any colour or counterfeiting of good works [i.e. by the believer’s own unaided efforts] (for in Christ Jesu neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision), but it is created by Christ after the image of God in righteousness and true holiness. . . . Therefore a new creature is the work of the Holy Ghost, which cleanseth our heart by faith, and worketh the fear of God, love, chastity, and other [Christian virtues], and giveth power to bridle the flesh and to reject the righteousness and wisdom of the world.

This is occasioned by the renewing of the mind by the Holy Spirit, after the which there followeth a change of the members and senses of the whole body. . . . These changes consist not in words, but are effectual, and bring a new spirit, a new will, new senses, and new operations of the flesh, so that the eyes, ears, mouth, and tongue do not only see, hear and speak otherwise than they did before, but the mind also approveth, [loveth] and followeth another thing than it did before. (WA /.–; Luther : –)

As will be clear from the passage from Luther’s Preface to the Latin Writings, Luther was steeped in the scholastic tradition of scriptural interpretation. Formally, his early lectures continued the tradition of marginal glosses (giving

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Introduction

detailed treatment of phrases and short passages and referring to ecclesiastical authorities), interlinear glosses providing brief paraphrases and analyses of sentences) and scholia (allowing for longer treatment of theological, often controversial, themes). In the course of the early years, he would gradually drop this practice in search of a more sustained, less fragmented interpretation of the sense of the text, though the individual elements of scholastic models would remain. Similarly, Luther was deeply influenced by the medieval understanding of the four senses of Scripture. As we have already seen with Aquinas, while the allegorical, tropological and anagogical senses were important in making out the spiritual meaning of the text, they were to be controlled by being related to the literal sense. Luther, as Wilhelm Pauck has argued, was initially strongly influenced by the French humanist Faber Stapulensis, who distinguished two kinds of literal sense: the historical, which he regarded as too dependent on the human imagination, and the prophetic, which he believed to be influenced by the Holy Spirit. In his reading of the Old Testament it was the christological sense which represented the prophetic-literal sense of the text and was identical with its spiritual meaning. In this way, Faber discarded the medieval four senses. Luther, so Pauck, drew heavily on humanist scholarship but sought a different appropriation of the medieval tradition of exegesis. For him the literal sense, which was to be pursued with all the philological and grammatical tools available, was to be sought in the christological sense which constituted the true meaning of the biblical text; and this was to be read tropologically. It was, that is to say, to be interpreted in terms of its moral or practical application in the life of the believer: We may say that the essence he [Luther] extracted from these sources was a comparatively simple rule, namely, that the Bible must be understood to speak (in terms of its spiritual-literal meaning) only of Christ and at the same time tropologice (in terms of the moral sense) of the believer in Christ. In other words, what is true of Christ is true also of his disciples; as God is and acts in Christ, so he is and acts in those who believe in Christ. (Pauck : xxxiii)

Behind this lay a view of God as active in and through God’s word: ‘God’s works are his words . . . His doing is identical with his speaking’ (WA /, ). ‘Such a view of God required a “causative interpretation” of the Biblical statements about him. He therefore thought, for example, that the Biblical phrase “God’s way” referred to the way in which God causes us to walk, and that by calling God holy, it means to say that he is holy in so far as he causes men to be holy, i.e. insofar as he sanctifies them. According to the prophetic-literal meaning of the Scripture, Christ is the righteousness of God (iustitiae Dei), but, tropologically understood, it is faith in Christ (fides Christi) which is this righteousness’ (Pauck : xxxiii–xxxiv, citing Ebeling ).

Introduction



Luther’s Galatians commentary stands out from all the other commentaries which we shall discuss. Among Luther’s own commentaries it is clearly the most influential. Whereas his Romans’ commentary was not published until , with the Weimar edition following only in  (Pauck : xvii–xxiv), Luther’s Galatians commentary of , based on his  lectures, circulated widely. Its English translation, which was first produced in , went through numerous editions and versions and was widely influential. Bunyan in Grace Abounding describes his sense of release on reading it: ‘I do prefer this book of Martin Luther upon the Galatians, excepting the Bible, before all books that I have ever seen, as most fit for a wounded conscience’ (Bunyan : ). In this he echoes the preface to the English edition, which informs the reader that ‘he need to have his senses exercised somewhat in such repentance. For no greater comfort to the soule of man can be found in any booke next to Holy Scripture than in this commentarie of Martin Luther . . . But onely where the conscience being in heauinesse hath need of the Phisitions hand’ (Watson : ). The influence of Luther’s commentary continued throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. W. Holland in his diaries records his own conversion in Charles Wesley’s house. Charles experienced the same ‘evangelical conversion’ on Whitsunday , and John had the same experience three days later (in his case influenced by Luther’s Preface to the Epistle to the Romans). The words which Charles read from the preface to the Galatians commentary which spoke so directly to Holland were these: ‘What, have we then nothing to do? No, nothing! But only accept of Him who of God is made unto us wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemption’ ( Cor :). Wesley summarized his own understanding as follows: ‘From this time forward I endeavoured to ground as many of our friends as came into this fundamental truth, salvation by faith alone, not an idle, dead faith, but a faith which works by love, and is necessarily productive of all good works and all holiness.’ Three years later John Wesley came to read Luther’s Galatians commentary for himself and was horrified by what he found: ‘a total ignorance with regard to sanctification’ (Watson : –). By contrast, Lightfoot  years later still finds Luther the commentator by which all must be judged: ‘no man had a better claim to a hearing on such a subject; for no man was better fitted by sympathy of like experiences to appreciate the character and teaching of St. Paul’ (Lightfoot : x). This brief account of the reception history of Luther’s commentary sheds light both on the character of Luther’s own reading and on the letter itself. There are fundamental tensions within the letter and Luther brings these out in his reading, which is among the most radical of all. To base one’s life on the free gift of wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption from Christ, whose own humanity has been endowed perfectly with all these gifts, is to experience peace and liberation, above all from the fear of eternal judgement

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and death. But this way of putting it raises a number of acute problems: what if I do not feel such ‘peace and love’? Is it because my faith is too weak? That I am not among the elect? The Puritan tradition would wrestle with such questions, and it is interesting that Bunyan, caught up in precisely such toils, should find relief in Luther. But again, what if the recipients of such gifts should turn out to be lacking in holiness? Is one to stress, as Melanchthon and Calvin did, the fact that our righteousness is imputed, an alien righteousness not our own? Or is one, with Calvin and John Wesley, to seek for a Christian understanding of law which will bring a new discipline and direction into the practical life of Christians? As I have suggested above, this is to overlook the importance in Luther’s teaching of his doctrine of vocation.

John Calvin John Calvin was born in Noyon in Picardy in , embarked on the study of theology in Paris, and then changed, probably in accordance with his father’s wishes, to the law, studying under Pierre de L’Étoile in Orléans and under Andreas Alcati in Bourges. In Bourges he studied Greek under Melchior Volmar, a humanist with evangelical leanings. On the death of his father he returned to Paris to devote himself to humanist studies and produced his first work, a commentary on Seneca’s De clementia (). The circumstances of his conversion remain uncertain: there are many ways in which he could have come in contact with the ideas of the Reformation (he had visited Strassburg in ), but the course of Calvin’s life in – is not easy to chart. He himself speaks of a ‘sudden conversion’ (Commentary on Psalms, preface), preceded by much heartsearching. He tells Sadolet in a letter that he was repelled by the novelty of the ideas and held back by his respect for the church. Oberman (: esp. –) argues persuasively that Calvin’s language in his writings of this time, not least the use of words like ‘labyrinth’ and ‘abyss’, indicates the deep turmoil that he was going through. Such words evoke not just the humanist’s dislike of irrationality and intellectual confusion, but a deeper sense of being hopelessly entangled in human guilt and sin. To encounter God’s judgment in this life: ‘Adam, where art thou?’ is already to know death. Growing persecution of Protestants in France led Calvin to flee Paris, adopting a pseudonym and making his way via Strassburg to Basel, which he reached in . Calvin relinquished the benefice that he held in Noyon in , wrote his Psychopannychia in the same year, and then, in  completed his Institutes of the Christian Religion with a letter of dedication to Francis I of France, which was published . In the same year Calvin arrived in Geneva, where he was persuaded by his friend Farel to stay and establish the Reformation in that city. Here, apart from a period of three years from

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 to , when, forced to flee Geneva, he worked in Strassburg as preacher to the French refugees, he taught and preached and engaged in the life of the city until his death in . Calvin’s beginnings lie in a period of intense political persecution in France. His life at that period was that of a refugee, fleeing the very real threat of incarceration, torture and death at the stake. As he struggles to find his bearings in the confusion of his early years, he discovers the covenanting God who accompanies his people throughout their trials. As he says in his preface to the  Bible of Pierre Robert Olivétan: ‘he accompanied them [the children of Israel] night and day on their flight, present among them as a fugitive himself ’ (Backus and Chimelli : .f.). Oberman comments: ‘In unfolding his biblical theology and in building his institutions, Calvin used a whole range of authors from Augustine to Luther, from d’Étaples to Budé, from Erasmus to Bullinger; and he reflected currents ranging all the way from Platonism to late medieval Scotism. But at the center of the initia stand the never forgotten experience of the abyss as the deadly flight from God and the growing insight in the life-giving refuge with God’ (Oberman : ). While Calvin initially embarked on the study of theology at Paris, and was clearly deeply read in the patristic and medieval theological tradition, his intellectual formation was in the humanist tradition and bore its first fruits in a commentary on Seneca’s De clementia. Unlike Luther, he did not begin his career in an established post as a professor of biblical studies within the medieval church. Thus, in approaching his commentaries on the Bible, he was in a sense free to choose his own way of working. As well as the classical models which he followed for his De clementia, Calvin, as he discusses in his preface to his Romans commentary, was attracted to the commentaries of Luther’s close colleague, Melanchthon, and the works of Bullinger and Bucer. As Parker () has argued, Melanchthon was greatly influenced by Aristotelian models of textual exposition and explanation. In commenting on a text, the critic’s primary task was the discernment (inventio) of the main subjects or basic concepts of the text, its loci. Once these had been discovered, then the commentator could develop these topics in light of the way in which his subject had treated them. Thus Melanchthon’s commentaries contain longer discussions of particular topics, which could then be further developed into a form of extended discussion of Christian theology, as he indeed did in his Loci communes. Similar tendencies can be seen in Bullinger’s work. Trained in Cologne, which was a stronghold of scholastic theology, he nevertheless began reading the Fathers, which he found to be closer to the approach of Luther and Melanchthon. His commentaries, while seeking to identifying the status of the text–that is, its underlying theme and purpose–nevertheless seek to avoid long theological discussions of these topics as such, but rather to explain the text in its literary and socio-cultural context, and in relation to the particular occasion on which it

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Introduction

was written. Bucer’s approach to the commentary form bears considerable similarity to the former two writers but whereas they had kept the development of loci separate from the continuous explanation of the text, he happily combined the two. The result was a commentary which provided ennarationes perpetuae: that is to say, continuous explanations of the text, together with paraphrases, such as Erasmus had earlier provided, and also fuller treatments of dogmatic points. The result was also, inevitably, lengthy. Calvin’s approach is clear: he first produced his Christianae religionis Institutio, and then, once he had settled in Geneva, proceeded to spend the rest of his life commenting on biblical texts, starting with the Pauline epistles. His commentary on Romans was based on lectures given in Geneva and written up in Strassburg during his enforced exile from Geneva. Completed in , it was published the next year. Thereafter he worked his way through the Pauline epistles, including Hebrews, in canonical order. The commentaries on  and  Corinthians were published after a long gap in  and ; those on Galatians, Ephesians and Philippians were published together in , the same years as those on  and  Timothy; that on Hebrews in . A complete edition of all the commentaries on the Pauline epistles (including Hebrews) was first published in Latin in , followed by a French version in . The commentaries on the epistles were then followed by a commentary on the Gospel of John (), a harmony of the first three Gospels (), and a commentary on Acts ( and ), but not by a commentary on Revelation. In a letter to his friend Simon Grynée, written as a preface to his commentary on Romans, Calvin sets out his views on the most appropriate form for a commentary, recalling conversations which he and Grynée had enjoyed in Basel. In view of his distinguished predecessors, he had wondered whether it was appropriate at all that he should undertake such a work. But there were still tasks to be addressed. Melanchthon, he observes, had, because of his concentration on the central themes of Paul’s letter, omitted to comment on all points of interest. He, then, would write a continuous commentary on all the text, making good such omissions. Bucer had produced a work so voluminous that it was too long for most readers and ‘too high to be understood easily by “les petits”’; he would produce a work for those who ‘are distracted by other occupations’. Above all, it should be brief and free of obscurity. All this would inevitably entail repeating things already said by others, but ‘because very often they do not agree with one another, and because this causes difficulty to those who are subtle of spirit and are thus in doubt as to which opinion they should follow’, he resolved to produce a commentary which would show which was the better interpretation (Calvin : –). The problem of diversity of interpretation of Scripture was one which exercised Calvin greatly, hardly surprisingly in a world where the price of non-conformity was torture and death at the stake.

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Such problems could be avoided only if all could agree on the correct interpretation of Scripture. The search for such a key to unlock the true meaning of the Bible was indeed one of the main factors in the development of biblical criticism. The matter was put clearly enough by Valerianus Magni in his De acatholicorum credendi regula iudicium (Prague , in Scholder : –, esp. ). If one could only find a rule for interpreting Scripture which would yield results as certainly as a ruler allows one to draw a straight line, then religious peace and concord would be assured. Calvin’s views on diversity of biblical interpretation are put clearly in his Galatians commentary, where in treating of Paul’s ‘allegory’ of Sarah and Hagar, he attacks all wilful and playful interpretations of Scripture. Origen, and many others along with him, have seized this occasion of twisting Scripture this way and that, away from the genuine sense (a genuino sensu). For they inferred that the literal sense is too meagre and poor, and that beneath the bark of the letter there lie deeper mysteries that cannot be extracted but by hammering out allegories. This ‘game of allegorizing Scripture’ met with such approval that it became highly prized, ‘a trick of Satan to impair the authority of Scripture and remove any true advantage out of the reading of it’. God avenged this profanation ‘when he suffered the pure meaning to be buried under false glosses’. Calvin continues: Scripture, they say, is fertile and thus bears multiple meanings. I acknowledge that Scripture is the most rich and inexhaustible fount of all wisdom. But I deny that its fertility consists in the various meanings which anyone may fasten to it at his pleasure. Let us know, then, that the true meaning of Scripture is the natural and simple one (verum sensum scripturae, qui germanus est et simplex), and let us embrace and hold it resolutely. Let us not merely neglect as doubtful, but boldly set aside as deadly corruptions, those pretended expositions which lead us away from the literal sense (a literali sensu) (Calvin : –).

There are strong echoes in this passage of the concluding remarks in the earlier preface to the Romans commentary. Calvin wrestles with the fact that there are diversities of interpretations even among the Reformed party, and that he himself is on occasion of a contrary opinion to that of the others. The important point is that they all hold Scripture in such reverence that they advance contrary opinions as ‘little as possible’, for that impugns its majesty, particularly when one advances such views ‘other than with great respect and using great sobriety’. It is an audacity which brings sacrilege in its wake, to ‘pull Scripture this way and that without any discretion and to play with it at one’s pleasure, as with something that is just made for a pastime’. Nevertheless, Calvin observes aptly, it is a fact that even those who have sought to treat of the divine mysteries with the greatest respect and sobriety have not always agreed. ‘For God has

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Introduction

never employed such liberality towards his servants that each of them should have a full, perfect and final understanding of all points; and there is no doubt that this was with a view to keeping us, in the first place, in a state of humility and, secondly, to nourishing in us the desire for and exercise of fraternal communication’ (Calvin : ). Calvin, as Parker () has persuasively argued, shared a humanist concern for ‘perspicua brevitas’. It is important to leave no shadow of doubt, ‘no obscurity at all’. Ambiguity, lack of clarity, can only lead to disputes and division. ‘The interpreter’s task is comprised in this sole point, to set out well and to discover the intention of the author whom he has undertaken to expound’ (Calvin : ). For it is here that the natural, genuine, simple, literal sense of Scripture is to be found. Calvin, that is to say, leaves behind the debates about the different senses of Scripture and seeks simply that single sense of Scripture which its author intends. He rejects the view that there is a spiritual sense alongside the literal sense, or that there are two different kinds of literal sense. What the interpreter needs to discern is the single sense intended by its author. That this will be a theological spiritual sense is beyond dispute, whether one takes the author as Paul himself or as God who inspires Paul to write what he does. What Calvin will not allow is that this sense could be in anyway obscure or that it should be expounded, in view of its metaphoric or figurative sense (or, indeed, in view of its sheer ambiguity), in radically different ways. Galatians has to be a problem epistle for Calvin. It is the epistle which gives the greatest support to those elements of Luther’s teaching against which Calvin reacts: above all, the sharp disjunction which Luther makes between gospel and Law. Calvin with his far greater stress on the unity of the old and new covenants cannot easily deal with those elements in Galatians which speak about the end of the Law. Nor would he have been too eager to stress those elements which underscore the freedom of the Christians in the Spirit, which produces fruit against which there is no law. In his introduction he describes the dispute as one about the observance of ceremonies. Insofar as Calvin regards such matters as of no importance, though originally part of the law and therefore not evil of themselves, he needs to explain why Paul found this matter of such significance. It is, he says, because Paul’s opponents ‘wanted to imprison men’s consciences by religion; for they placed righteousness in observances’. For this reason Paul needed to open up the wider matter of principle, that ‘we are justified in the sight of God freely and not by works of the law’. He needs, that is, to treat of the wider matter of justification by works of the Law in order to show why insistence on the observance of ceremonial laws is contrary to the Gospel. All this is fair enough, and it allows Calvin to make his protest against the use of religion to ensnare and imprison. Similarly, he spends much time in his introduction emphasizing Paul’s appeal to his authority as an apostle. It is not so much that Paul wants to insist on his posi-

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tion in the church, but that it is necessary for him to uphold his own authority against those who falsely claim to be authorized by the Jerusalem apostles. It is not too difficult to hear behind this Calvin’s own concerns about authority in a church where the authority of the appointed ministers is easily challenged by the Radical Reformation with its appeal to the inspiration of the Spirit. Similarly, Calvin’s reticence about Paul’s discussion of the end of the Law in Galatians is easily understood in the light of disputes among the Reformers over the ‘third use’ of the Law. For Calvin the law was there both to continue to goad believers into action out of fear of the wrath of God and also to instruct in the right way even those who were led by the Spirit. It, as the Word of God, was the standard by which all ethical judgements were to be assessed. Clearly this is not a doctrine which Paul addresses in this letter, and which indeed, it can easily be argued, is not easy to reconcile with his language about the end of the Law. Be that as it may, Calvin certainly makes no mention of the latter topic in his opening introduction and, in the text of the commentary, simply claims that the question of the continuing relevance of the Law to the lives of Christians is not a matter which Paul intends to or needs to discuss here. In this way, he can distance himself from Luther without having to confront his opinions directly. Similarly, in his introduction, he passes over the ethical chapters  and  in three sentences. They are an exhortation to ‘hold fast the liberty obtained by the blood of Christ and not to let their consciences be ensnared by the opinions of men’ (Calvin : ); albeit an exhortation with a rider not to ignore the proper limit of such liberty. In this way, Calvin seeks to restrain those forces in the Reformation which he experiences as destabilizing.

William Perkins William Perkins (–) was one of the formative influences on the development of the Puritan tradition in England and beyond. During the seventeenth century his books were widely translated into Latin, Dutch, Spanish, Welsh and Irish (J.H. Augustine : xlii, n ) and were equally to be found in the libraries of the New World. The ‘typical Plymouth Colony library comprised a large and a small Bible, Ainsworth’s translation of the Psalms, and the works of William Perkins, a favorite theologian’ (Morison : , in Sheppard : viii). Some have seen him as the father of Pietism (Heppe ; Lang ). There is little doubt that he was a greatly respected figure of his day, exercising his influence both through his preaching and teaching and through his many writings. Subsequently, his influence waned and his writings remained out of print from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Interest has grown, however, in the last hundred years (J.H. Augustine : xlii, n. ).

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Introduction

Born in Warwickshire in , he was educated by Laurence Chaderton, a well-known Puritan. When a student at Christ’s College in Cambridge (also a stronghold of Puritanism), he underwent a sudden conversion before becoming chaplain to the local prison in  and then fellow of Christ’s College from  to , when he had to resign his fellowship, as was customary, on his marriage. Christ’s College was viewed with suspicion by the university, both for its laxity in observation of university codes of discipline as well as for its theological and religious emphases: chapel services were not held at prescribed times, and were too long and interfered with lectures. Perkins was called before the vice-chancellor to explain a sermon in which he had attacked certain practices in worship: kneeling to receive communion, receiving the elements at his own hands by the celebrant and facing East. He was also called as a witness for the prosecution in the trial of Puritan ministers in –, to give evidence about one of their meetings which he had attended. His replies were suitably evasive. While clearly having sympathies with many Puritans, Perkins was not of the expressly Presbyterian party who wished to abandon episcopacy for presbyterial government. As Breward argues, Perkins, while as concerned as any with ‘the eradication of lingering superstition and merely formal protestantism’, nevertheless ‘showed an early scepticism about reformation by presbyterian or congregational polity . . . The answer to reformation lay much deeper – in personal renewal and experience of God’s grace’ (Breward : ). The Puritan movement, which had deep influence on the development of English Christianity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, grew out of a widespread desire to extend the work of the Reformation into the everyday life of the church. It is, however, notoriously difficult to define. Its principal sphere of influence was within the Church of England, but it extended into ‘separatist’ groups of Congregationalists, Baptists and many others at the time of the Civil War and the Commonwealth. In Elizabethan England after the reign of Mary, it found its first strong manifestations in the group of Presbyterians around Thomas Cartwright. More widely, it sought to rid the Church of England of any remnants of Catholicism which might be found in its worship or governance and to seek a renewal and rekindling of Christian belief and holiness. The tag ‘Puritan’ which was largely adversarial, nevertheless, as the Georges have suggested, may be taken by the Puritans themselves to refer to aspects of their spirituality which they valued. Perkins writes: ‘the pure heart is so little regarded, that the seeking after it is turned to a by-word, and a matter of reproach: who are branded with vile tearmes of Puritans and Presition, as those that indeavour to get and keepe the puritie of heart in a good conscience?’ (Perkins –: iii.). Or again: ‘For the practice of that religion which stands by the law of God, and the good lawes of this land, is nicknamed with tearmes of Preciseness and Purity. A thing much to be lamented; for this bewraies

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that there is a great want of the grace of God among us’ (Perkins –: ii. – in George and George : –). This linking of law and grace, of true evangelical religion with personal and communal law-abiding behaviour, is characteristic of English Puritanism. In Perkins’s writings, not least in his commentary, it expresses itself in an endeavour to combine a careful analysis of the inner life and experience of those who live under grace with a clear exposition of the laws by which they are to live – no mean feat in the case of a commentary on Galatians. Puritan analysis of Christian experience always had one eye on the question of assurance, of how believers could know with certainty that they were to be numbered among the elect. Perkins’s early work on this specific topic was entitled Treatise Tending unto a Declaration Whether a Man Be in the Estate of Damnation or in the Estate of Grace (). Later his work dealt with specific questions of conscience, treating detailed ethical questions in a way which had striking parallells with the casuistic methods of the Jesuits (The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience,  and ). Perkins was, however, much more deeply influenced by the work of Calvinist theologians on the Continent like Theodore Beza. Beza sought to give an account of the Christian experience of grace within a framework based on a doctrine of the eternal decrees of God which, while indebted to Calvin, also derived much from scholastic and Aristotelian modes of theological argument. Perkins’s account of such theology, which was hugely influential, was first offered in the armilla aureus, which appeared in English as A Golden Chain (Perkins , cited here according to Breward ). This is explicitly an account of ‘the order of God’s predestination’. Perkins identifies three false views which he will ‘oppugn as erroneous’ and one which he will maintain ‘as being truth which will bear the weight in the balance of the sanctuary’. The first, Pelagian, false view holds that the cause of God’s predestination lies in man, for it holds that God preordains what he foresees: namely, that some will of their own free will accept grace, while others for the same reason will reject it. The second view, which Perkins describes as Lutheran, holds that God ‘foreseeing how all mankind being shut up under unbelief would therefore reject grace offered, did hereupon purpose to choose some to salvation of his mere mercy without any respect of their faith and good works, and the rest to reject, being moved to do this because he did eternally foresee that they would reject his grace offered them in the gospel’. The third view is the semi-Pelagian view of the papists, who ‘ascribe God’s predestination partly to mercy and partly to men’s foreseen preparations and meritorious works’. Perkins’s own view is that ‘the cause of the execution of God’s predestination is his mercy in Christ, in them which are saved, and in them which perish, the fall and corruption of man: yet so, as that the decree and eternal counsel of God concerning them both hath not any

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Introduction

other cause beside his will and pleasure’ (Breward : –). Perkins, that is, distinguishes God’s eternal decree, which is wholly independent of men’s and women’s choice (whereas for Lutherans God’s election is dependent on God’s foreseeing of men’s and women’s rejection of his proffered grace), and God’s execution of his decree, wherein he used human choice as his instrument. A Golden Chaine is breathtaking in its assurance and certainty. It first sets out a doctrine of God, of his being and action, then proceeds to relate the story of salvation in terms of his eternal decrees and their execution. Everything that happens, good or evil, happens in accordance with God’s will, though good occurs as a result of God’s operation and evil as a result of his permissive will. ‘God permitteth evil by a certain voluntary permission, in that he forsaketh the second cause in working evil. And he forsaketh his creature either by detracting the grace it had, or not bestowing that which it wanteth. Neither must we think God herein unjust, who is indebted to none. Yea, it is God’s good pleasure to bestow how much grace and upon whom he will’ (Breward : –). This may save the doctrine of God’s special providence, but the thought that God may forsake us by retracting the grace we once had is hardly one which leads to great peace of mind. The rest of the book can be seen as an attempt to reassure the elect of their state of grace by spelling out the manner in which God executes his eternal decree. The central section of the book treats the person and work of Christ, the ‘foundation of God’s election’, by whom God’s merciful will is effected. In his life and death he perfectly fulfils the law of the covenant of works and undergoes the punishment of sin, satisfying God’s justice and appeasing ‘his anger for the sins of the faithful’ (not, that is, for the sins of the reprobate) and confirming to us ‘the testament, or covenant of grace, promised for our sakes’ (Breward : , ). The covenants of works and of grace are the ‘outward means of executing the decree of election and of the decalogue’. Later Puritan theology would reflect long and hard on the nature of covenant. The issue which divided them concerned the question of the human role in the covenant of grace. To what extent was this a reciprocal covenant, which rested not only on God’s covenanted mercy but on human worship and obedience to the divine command? ‘Strict’ Calvinists, following Calvin, emphasized God’s – free – promise of grace, while so-called ‘moderates’ laid stress on the human contribution. Here they followed figures like Tyndale, Zwingli and Bullinger, who emphasized the vows of obedience taken by believers at baptism. In Perkins’s case there is a degree of ambiguity. He certainly speaks of the covenant as a contract with conditions on both sides: God’s covenant is his contract with man concerning the obtaining of life eternal upon a certain condition. This covenant consists of two parts – God’s promise to

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man, man’s promise to God. God’s promise to man is that whereby he bindeth himself to man to be his God, if he perform the condition. Man’s promise to God is that whereby he voweth his allegiance unto his Lord and to perform the condition between them.

As far as the law of works is concerned, the condition laid upon men and women is ‘perfect obedience,’ which only Christ can – and does – fulfil. ‘The covenant of grace is that whereby God freely promising Christ and his benefits, exacts again of man that he would by faith receive Christ and repent of his sins.’ But in what sense is the condition of faith and repentance something, like the requirement of perfect obedience laid on the parties to the covenant of works, which parties to the covenant of grace have to fulfil of their own efforts? What Perkins has already said about the nature of God’s action in causing good through his grace, would suggest strongly that this is not to be seen as a requirement laid upon men’s and women’s free will. And this is confirmed by his talking of the covenant as a kind of testament, confirmed by the death of the testator, and requiring on the part of the heirs only that they receive, and by speaking of the gospel as the ‘conduit pipe of the Holy Ghost to fashion and derive faith into the soul: by which faith, they which believe do, as with an hand, apprehend Christ’s righteousness’ (Breward : , ). Perkins makes the same points about the nature of the covenant in his commentary: the things promised, as remission of sinnes, and life everlasting, are given after the manner of legacies, that is freely, without our desert or procurement. In this we see the great goodness of God, who vouchsafeth to name them in his testament, that have made covenant with the divell, and are children of wrath by nature, as we are. (Perkins : )

The key question is, of course, is my name in the will? While such a theology clearly relieves believers of the responsibility of producing good works as their part of the bargain, it leaves the way open for a different kind of anxiety: what if, despite the outward signs of grace in their lives, God should nevertheless choose to withdraw his grace, because they are among the reprobate? Perkins’s strategy is to trace out the various stages of the drama of salvation in which the believer is caught up: ‘the degrees of executing God’s decree of election’. Altogether there are four degrees, which are elucidated at length: calling, justification, sanctification, glorification. These provide rich descriptions of the different stages of the Christian life: calling emphasizes the giving of the sinful man to Christ to be saved, and of Christ to the sinful man ‘so that he may boldly say this thing, namely, Christ, both God and man, is mine and I for my benefit and use enjoy the same’ (Breward : ). This calling is ‘executed’ by various means: the preaching of the Word, the mollifying of the

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Introduction

heart, which leads to ‘an holy desperation of a man’s own power in the obtaining of eternal life’ and faith. This is defined as a miraculous and supernatural faculty of the heart, apprehending Christ Jesus being applied by the operation of the Holy Ghost and receiving it to itself. Christ is received when every several person doth particularly apply unto himself Christ with his merits by an inward persuasion of the heart, which cometh none other way but by the effectual certificate of the Holy Ghost concerning the mercy of God in Christ Jesus.

Faith itself is said to have five degrees, leading up to ‘an especial persuasion imprinted in the heart by the Holy Ghost, whereby every faithful man doth particularly apply unto himself those promises which are made in the gospel’ (Breward : –). It is not difficult to recognize the anatomy of conversion which will exercise such influence within the Puritan/Pietist tradition. This is a very different treatment of the notion of calling from that of either Luther or Calvin, where the main focus is on the station and role in society into which the believer is called. This brief discussion of Christian calling must stand for the similarly detailed analyses of justification, sanctification and glorification. The whole is richly illustrated with passages and themes from Scripture in such a way that the private reading of the scriptures becomes a means of charting one’s own spiritual development and progress along the stages of salvation. Perkins, for instance, makes use of Gal : in describing the Christian warfare which is an integral aspect of sanctification (Breward : ). This is a theme also developed in a treatise Of the combat of flesh and spirit (; see George and George : ). There can be little doubt that this kind of analysis of the Christian life, of the degrees by which God’s decrees are executed, opens up a world of introspection and self-examination which will have enormous cultural consequences across Europe. For Perkins the application of such doctrines is twofold. First, it is to enable people to determine whether or not they are among the elect. For this purpose, Perkins sets out eight rules, insisting, inter alia, that it is only the individual himself who can make such a judgement which should be based above all on the effects of election, most notably the testimony of God’s Spirit and the works of sanctification. The latter include bewailing our sins, striving against the flesh, ‘that is to resist and to hate the ungodly motions therof and with grief to think them burthenous and troublesome’, the readiness to die a martyr, ‘to fly all occasions of sin and seriously endeavour to come to newness of life; to persevere in these things to the last gasp of life’. There is an interesting tension here between the high doctrine of union with Christ and the relatively low expectations of Christian progress suggested by this list. Perkins returns to the question

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

of faith, one of the two conditions of the covenant of grace. This will be a recurrent theme in Protestant spiritual writing. What if the believer’s faith is weak? Is that an indication that he is not among the elect? ‘It is most sure that if they have faith but as a mustard seed and be as weak as a young infant is, it is sufficient to ingraft them into Christ.’ And the ‘use’ of this doctrine? It is to remind believers that there is ‘neither any justification by works, nor are any works of ours that are meritorious, for election is by the free grace of God and therefore in the like sort is justification’. And it is to encourage us to persevere: ‘to fight against all doubting and diffidence of our salvation’, the ‘anchor of hope’ being ‘fixed in that truth and stability of the immutable good pleasure of God’; to give all glory to God; to do good works (Breward : –). Such is the literary, theological and cultural context out of which Perkins’s commentary on Galatians springs. The commentary itself was based on sermons delivered on Sundays over a period of three years at St Andrew’s in Cambridge. The finished text covered the first five chapters of the letter and was lightly edited by Ralph Cudworth, the father of the Cambridge Platonists, who himself added the commentary on the sixth chapter. As Cudworth says of the chapters which Perkins left behind at his death: ‘they were penned the last of all his works, being come to ripenesse of judgement: and that upon mature deliberation after his Sermons, (as his manner was)’ (Perkins : Ar). Thus, while they have much about them of the oral delivery of sermons, they are also the result of further reflection and bear the marks of a resolutely analytical mind, influenced by contemporary analytical rhetoric championed by his Cambridge colleague, Peter Ramus (McKim ). Cudworth, whose commentary on chapter  runs to some  pages (compared to Perkins’s  on the first five chapters), comments on Perkins’s brevity as follows: ‘And as for the measure, in regard of brevitie or prolixity, the golden meane hath alway beene judged by the learned to be the best, which is not onely to give the bare meaning paraphrastically, but to make collection of doctrine and application of uses; yet briefly, rather pointing at the chiefe, then dwelling long upon any point.’ Perkins, says Cudworth, certainly eschewed the allegorical, anagogical and tropological senses, preferring the literal sense, which ‘is the onely sense intended by the Spirit of God’ (Perkins : Ar). In practice, it is a far cry from the cultured brevity of Calvin’s commentary, more like the sprawling, extensive work of Bucer which Calvin chose not to emulate. It is a commentary which betrays its origins in teaching and preaching, full of practical applications and digressions to expand on practical points of ethical and theological teaching, exhortations to persevere, not to be downhearted, such as we have seen in his Golden Chaine. Despite what the text of Galatians might suggest in relation to the end of the Law, Perkins makes clear his belief that the Law, as found in either the Old or the New Testament, is of

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Introduction

continuing validity in the life of the believers and seeks to offer ethical instruction wherever possible to bring about the renewal of English church and society which he so much desired. As we shall see, this may on occasion entail deriving ethical prescriptions from Paul’s metaphors, which are employed by Paul with quite other purposes. It certainly includes ethical and legal instructions which, while derived with rigour from the Old Testament, would today shock many in the Puritan tradition (the burning of witches, the stoning of adulterers). But despite this, there is a humanity about his writing and pastoral intentions which is undeniable and allows one to glimpse something of the personality of one who was mourned in a funeral sermon preached on the text ‘Moses my servant is dead’ by his friend, the Puritan Master of Sidney Sussex College and later bishop of Winchester, James Montagu.

Ferdinand Christian Baur While there is much more that could be said about the reception of Galatians in the Calvinist tradition, which might shed considerable light on developments within Protestantism across the world over the last four centuries, we finally look more closely at two major representatives of nineteenth-century historical theology, which comes more and more to dominate the study of the New Testament from the end of the eighteenth century. Ferdinand Christian Baur was born in  in Württemberg, the son of a Lutheran pastor, and received his – orthodox Lutheran – theological education in the Tübinger Stift. From  to  he taught classics, ancient history and mythology at the Seminary in Blaubeuren. B.G. Niebuhr’s historical method in his History of Rome had a lasting influence on him. Among his pupils was D.F. Strauss. In  he was appointed professor for historical subjects at Tübingen, a post which he held till his death in . As a historian, Baur sought to give a unified view of the development of human consciousness which would embrace all religious phenomena. His early work Symbolik und Mythologie oder die Naturreligion des Altertums (–) offered an account of world history as a history of revelation. Such a history, he argued, could be conceived only in terms of the development of human consciousness, ‘as the total consciousness of humanity, whose living unity . . . is the mirror of the divine spirit’ (RGG i. ). Such a writing of religious history was conceived as complementary to Schleiermacher’s account of the Christian faith as an articulation of the Christian ‘pious self-consciousness’. This complementarity opened the way for the writing of a universal history of religion which would show the place of Christianity within the world religions, a project which would engage many in the nineteenth century and be vigorously opposed, as we shall see, by more conservative churchmen, like Bishop Lightfoot.

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The view of the revelation of the divine spirit as mediated through the changes and contradictions of human self-consciousness, which Baur espoused, conflicted sharply with the supranaturalistic views of revelation cultivated in the Lutheran Orthodox circles in which he had been brought up and trained. On such a view Jesus, the Son of God and second person of the Trinity, had descended to earth to reveal the eternal mysteries of the Gospel and to perform the saving work by which all who believed were to be justified. Belief in this saving Gospel was a necessary condition of salvation. The Bible was an infallible record of such divine revelation. Orthodox views of Christianity had been the subject of fierce criticism throughout the eighteenth century: rationalists and Deists had attacked the doctrine of the infallibility of Scripture, exposing its many contradictions (not least in the accounts of the Resurrection), attacking the moral integrity of central characters in the biblical narratives (David!), questioning the morality of the doctrine of the atonement, the authenticity of the accounts of the miracles, the religious adequacy of the Old Testament (on the grounds that it had no adequate teaching about life after death), the biblical basis of the doctrine of the Trinity and the justice of the requirement of belief in the gospel for salvation (on the grounds that only a very small proportion of those who had ever lived would have been in a position to make such an assent). Such criticisms had been masterfully brought together in Lessing’s publication of Reimarus’s Fragments (Riches : –), and this occasioned a major debate in theological circles, which forced theologians to consider the implications of historical study for their understanding of the nature of revelation and of the biblical narratives. At the same time, major shifts in philosophy had been occurring, following Immanuel Kant’s sustained critique of the metaphysical tradition in his Critique of Pure Reason. ‘Human reason’, Kant wrote in his preface, ‘has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer’ (Kant : ; A vii, st German edn ). The concepts by which we make sense of our world as we are confronted by experience, without which, indeed, our experience of the world would be quite unintelligible, cannot of themselves, argued Kant, give us knowledge of things in themselves. We cannot know, in the way that we know that there is a river which, when in spate, washed away the bridge, that there is a God, who is the cause of all that is and who is responsible for our eternal fate. We want to know what is the cause of all that is, whether we have an immortal soul, what is the ground of our sense of obligation, and whether or not we are free to act according to the dictates of our conscience; but we cannot know the answers to these questions on the basis of our rational concepts alone, because that would be to use them improperly (‘to transcend their powers’). Their

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Introduction

proper use is in making sense of the experience of the world around us that we enjoy. On this basis, Kant delivered a withering critique of the traditional proofs of the existence of God and of traditional metaphysics as a whole, on which not only Catholic theology but, since the seventeenth century, Calvinist and Lutheran Orthodoxy had been founded. The critique was not only negative in intent: Kant wanted to destroy knowledge (the knowledge of transcendent realities) in order to make room for faith (Kant : , B xxx). Kant, that is to say, wished to liberate human belief, morality and religion from the illusions of metaphysics and metaphysical theology in order to allow for a proper evaluation of human morality and faith. This is in turn opened the way for a searching investigation of human subjectivity in philosophy (Schelling, Hegel) and theology (Schleiermacher) with which Baur was in constant dialogue. We also need to be aware of the wider political and social context in which Baur worked. Eighteenth-century confessional Orthodoxy had been greatly supported by its links with the many small principalities in Germany: a belief in original sin could provide a powerful argument against independent judgement on the part of those who would oppose the authority of church and state, and a Lutheran doctrine of two kingdoms provided support for an all too easy partnership between two forms of authoritarianism, secular and ecclesiastical. Figures like Reimarus and Lessing were deeply critical of such an alliance. At the same time, autocratic forms of government were also challenged by the economic power of the emerging middle classes, which would grow dramatically as the Industrial Revolution spread throughout Europe in the nineteenth century. They were the direct object of the attacks of the French Revolution and, much more ambiguously, of the Napoleonic armies. As the power of the aristocracy waned, so the power of the middle classes and the universities grew. In Germany, however, after the Napoleonic wars, the old monarchies (within somewhat redrawn territories) were restored and formed powerful alliances with conservative forces within the churches. Theological criticism was regarded with grave suspicion, and individual freedom was restricted to the cultivation of personal piety. This alliance between a paternalistic and conservative state and the churches led to an increasing polarization between liberals and conservatives, with liberals becoming more and more opposed to the churches. Figures like Schleiermacher and Baur, however, took a rather different way. Whereas D.F. Strauss pleaded for a complete break with the church, Baur argued for a critical appropriation of the Christian tradition in order to discern the truly progressive forces within in it. For this reason he rejected the new Orthodoxy as an impediment to the true progress which it was the role of Protestantism to bring about. Critical sifting of the tradition would show there was much in such Orthodoxy which was incompatible with the self-understanding of those who had an informed understanding of their faith, and that such

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opposition was not simply the product of contemporary unbelief. ‘There is also a justified unbelief and unfettered historical research more and more shows that much which gives offence to a modern cast of mind cannot be seen as an authentic part of original Christianity’ (quoted in Greschat : ). Baur did not write a commentary on Galatians, but Galatians was important for Baur in two major respects. In the first instance it provides first-hand evidence, along with the other epistles which Baur judged to be indisputably authentic (Romans, and  and  Corinthians), of the new self-consciousness which emerged in Christianity as the Roman Principate enjoyed its first flowering. This because, like those other epistles, it expressed in unadulterated form the Law-free gospel, which Baur saw as lying at the heart of Paul’s theology. Other epistles, which might or might not be ascribed to Paul, betrayed a mixture of theological tendencies, a fact which Baur saw as pointing towards a later date. This process of assessing the authenticity of the New Testament documents Baur called Tendenzkritik. Writing the introduction to his Church History of the First Three Centuries in , Baur dwells on the consequences for any history of the starting point which one chooses. This is particularly so in the case of Christianity. If one identifies the starting point from which the movement issues as ‘the most stupendous of miracles’: namely, the fact that the Son of God descended from heaven and became incarnate in the womb of the Virgin, then the narrator ‘steps at once outside of all historical connection’. Yet even on such a supranaturalist view of Christian origins it is not possible to avoid historical questions: simply to ask the question why ‘the miracle with which Christianity begins was brought to bear on history at this particular point of time’ is to raise ‘a series of questions which can only be answered by historical treatment’. What makes this particular historical juncture singularly appropriate for the emergence of Christianity? Baur’s answer is clear: It is a consideration of real significance for the history of the world, that the epoch which saw the Roman empire complete the union of all the nations of the world as it then was in a monarchy, also witnessed the beginning of the religion in which all religious particularism disappeared and gave way to universalism. . . . [T]he time had come when the human spirit was to make this momentous advance. As the barriers and divisions between the different countries and nationalities were dissolved before the ever-advancing power of the Romans, and their general subjection to a common head caused men to be aware of the unity in which their differences disappeared, the whole spiritual consciousness was proportionately enlarged, and found itself led more and more to disregard the distinctions and exclusiveness which separated men from each other, and to lay hold of what was universal. . . . The universalism of Christianity is essentially nothing but that universal form of consciousness at which the development of mankind had arrived at the time when Christianity appeared. (Baur : –)

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Introduction

Galatians, with its doctrine of justification by faith and not by works of the (particularistic) Law and of union with Christ, as the new inner spiritual principle of Christian self-consciousness, provides direct evidence of the emergence of this new universal religion. Secondly, Galatians also provides evidence of the processes by which this new universal religion came to triumph within the community of those who followed Jesus as the Messiah. For here, as in Corinth and Rome, the conflict is fought out between those who sought to impose observation of the Law on Gentile Christians and so to resist the new universal self-consciousness, and those, like Paul, who insisted on a gospel of faith and freedom, based in a doctrine of a spiritual Messiah and of a new God(Christ)-consciousness. In Christ, those subjective spirits which have in them the mind of Christ, who unites all opposites, are united to the objective spirit. Pneuma, ‘spirit’, as opposed to sarx, ‘flesh’, denotes the sphere of the eternal, the absolute as opposed to the finite. Such spirit is not simply an understanding that acquires knowledge of the world of appearances around it, but a knowledge of itself as caught up in the eternal spirit. The history of early Christianity is the history of the struggle between these opposed principles in the church which is resolved as these sharp oppositions are overcome in the forms of early Christianity which find expression in the deutero-Paulines and the Pastorals. For Baur, these emerging forms of Christianity must have seemed to embrace the kinds of compromise with the true freedom of the gospel which he criticized in contemporary forms of Protestantism. In our commentary below we will draw on Baur’s work and also on Adolf Hilgenfeld’s  Galatians commentary. Hilgenfeld (–) taught in Jena from , eventually becoming Ordinarius (full professor) in . He owed his allegiance to the Tübingen school, though he distinguished his own method of ‘literary historical criticism’ from Baur’s ‘tendency criticism’. Literary criticism in this sense looks at the relationships of literary dependence which exist (or may be posited as existing) between the New Testament documents as key to their dates and interdependence. Hilgenfeld’s interests, apart from the study of the Gospels and their relationships, were in the development of Jewish apocalyptic and in the extra-canonical texts and heretical movements of early Christianity. ‘Hilgenfeld himself described for the first time the whole of Jewish and Christian apocalyptic as a “distinctive historical force” and saw in Jewish apocalyptic “the historical bridge between Old Testament prophecy and Christianity”’ (Kümmel : , quoting Schmidt : ). This interest in the parentage of religious ideas was one of the driving characteristics of the history of religions movement of which Hilgenfeld is one of the earliest protagonists. Hilgenfeld’s commentary is certainly very different in form from those of

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Calvin and Luther. Over half its length is taken up with an opening essay setting the letter in its historical and ideological context, together with an appendix on the dating and occasion of the letter’s composition, the chronology of Paul’s life and work, and Marcion’s text. Yet, just as Baur is interested in Galatians as giving access both to the conflicts within the early church and to the distinctive self-consciousness which came to expression in Paul, so too Hilgenfeld sets out to satisfy his interest in the conflicts in the early church but ends up trying to set down his understanding of Paul’s letter in a continuous commentary (Hilgenfeld III–V). I could not separate myself from this letter of the apostle before I had traced through all its details the clarity and firmness of his spirit and character which was not to be shaken by storms of any kind, till I had discerned the freshness and liveliness of the spiritual conception which runs through the letter, until I had enlivened the general understanding of the letter I had arrived at with the breath of his deeply powerful individuality, which is everywhere present. (Hilgenfeld : IV)

And his encounter with Paul’s spirit leaves him encouraged that the ‘spirit of Christian freedom, which is not limited by any external ordinances, by any new Judaistic externality and legalism in either the dogmatic or the practical sphere, that this spirit cannot be suppressed despite all the temptations which exist in the Protestant church, any more than that scientific enquiry will be vanquished which in full freedom and independence indeed proves its Protestant and Christian legitimacy in so far as it succeeds in penetrating into the depths of the religious life of the primal era of Christianity’ (Hilgenfeld : VI). It is interesting to compare Baur and Hilgenfeld, with their search for an understanding of the nature of the theological disputes within earliest Christianity and their efforts to uncover Paul’s self-consciousness, with Calvin’s stated intention to express as clearly and concisely as he could what it was that the apostle wanted to say. It would be possible to say that there is a shift here from an engagement with the theological teaching of the letter (as expounded by Calvin) to a quest for historical understanding of the development of human self-consciousness which Baur and Hilgenfeld both believe finds expression in the texts. And this is true at one level and corresponds closely to the different understandings of revelation which were held by the three. One way of representing this would be to say that Baur and Hilgenfeld are looking for the reality behind the text: the historical events and processes for which it is evidence, rather than wishing simply to hear what Paul is trying to teach them. And that, too, contains more than a grain of truth. A critical reading should be as critical of, say, Paul’s account of the events in Antioch as it is the account of the same events in Acts. But in another sense, both Baur and Hilgenfeld also

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Introduction

want to hear what Paul has to say, and to hear it in such a way that they are able to penetrate into the very heart of his new experience of God. The difference between Calvin and Baur/Hilgenfeld is more that Calvin expects to hear Paul talking about the ways of God with his people, about election, covenants, law and grace, faith and love, about justification and sanctification (in short about those topics which in the Institutes, on the basis of his reading of Paul, he identified as the central themes of Paul’s teaching); while Baur and Hilgenfeld expect to be able to grasp something of the new self-consciousness that is forming in Paul. This is certainly not to be seen as an opposition between theological beliefs (Calvin) and some form of religious experience or mysticism which cannot be caught in language (Baur). Baur certainly has concepts which enable him to give an account of Paul’s new self-consciousness, but they are not, in the end, Paul’s: they are borrowed from the philosophies of his day, from Schelling and Hegel. ‘Without philosophy’, Baur wrote in his Symbolik und Mythologie, ‘for me history remains eternally deaf and dumb’ (RGG i.). Baur’s critics have often argued that his attachment to an Idealist understanding of history led him to reconstructions of the development of early Christianity which were unduly speculative. However that may be, Baur’s achievement was both to have offered an account of such development which related it to the wider religious culture of the first century in ways which were authentically historical and to have offered an account of the beliefs of first-century Christians in terms which were intelligible to his own contemporaries. If Luther and Calvin were essentially in dialogue with the Christian tradition of interpretation of Galatians, Baur was struggling to gain a hearing for Christianity in the increasingly hostile environment of German universities and was in this respect a pioneer. In the light of Kant’s criticisms of the kind of traditional metaphysics which had played such a part in Thomist and Calvinist readings of Scripture, Baur sought to replace Aristotelian metaphysics with a German Idealism which developed a new ontology out of an understanding of the human subject in its historicity, as a subject engaged in dialogue with the world spirit. Church history is no longer simply the story of the development of the institution and of its dogmas and interaction with the world around it; it is the culmination of the history of the world spirit as it comes to expression in the dialectic of the opposing forces within religious history.

Joseph Barber Lightfoot In the Galatians’ commentary of Joseph Barber Lightfoot, we encounter historical work on the epistles in a very different mode from Baur. Indeed, there is a good case to be made for saying that the whole of his work is in a meas-

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ure a response to Baur (Hengel ). Lightfoot was born in Liverpool in , educated at King Edward’s School in Birmingham, where Westcott preceded him and E.W. Benson, later archbishop of Canterbury, was his contemporary and close friend. In  he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, read classics, coming top of his year and being elected to a fellowship at Trinity in . In  he was elected Hulsean Professor of Divinity, and in  Lady Margaret’s Professor. In  he accepted a canonry at St. Paul’s, and in  was consecrated bishop of Durham. With Westcott and Hort he formed a triumvirate of Cambridge scholars who left an enduring mark on English-speaking biblical scholarship. Between them they agreed to comment on all the books of the New Testament, Lightfoot undertaking the commentary on the Pauline epistles. His Galatians commentary was published in  when he was at Cambridge. It was there that he also completed his work on Philippians (),  and  Clement (), Colossians and Philemon (). Much of the latter part of his life was devoted to a study of the Apostolic Fathers, producing a critical edition of the Ignatian epistles and the Letter of Polycarp in . A five-volume complete edition of the Apostolic Fathers, on which he was still working up till his death, was posthumously published in . These bare outlines of Lightfoot’s career already make it possible to see something of the differences between Lightfoot and Baur. Baur was the son of an orthodox Lutheran minister whose spiritual and intellectual way led to his becoming more and more marginalized in the church, someone who was committed to political liberalization and who engaged seriously with contemporary philosophy. Lightfoot, a middleof-the-road Anglican, regarded well by the hierarchy as someone who would not prefer High Churchmen to ecclesiastical positions of influence, took an increasing part in the affairs of the church, dying as one of the senior bishops in the Church of England, considered for the archbishopric of Canterbury. He was a scholar-bishop, devout, hard-working, an immensely learned classicist and early church historian, producing one of the great editions of early Christian texts, through which he effectively destroyed Baur’s chronology of the New Testament writings. In all this he remained essentially a conservative figure, believing in the inspiration of Scripture, a Protestant Anglican with serious respect for Luther. Lightfoot, it is widely acknowledged, has been an immensely influential figure in English-speaking biblical studies. He has provided an outstanding example of careful scholarly engagement with the New Testament text; his commentaries on the epistles and the extended dissertations which they contain set the tone for much that was to come. What is their form? How do they stand in relation to the commentary tradition which we have been tracing? Essentially, the form of the Galatians commentary is of a paraphrase with supporting grammatical, linguistic and historical notes. The paraphrase is of the Greek text,

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based on a revision of the text by Westcott and Hort, with some modifications by Lightfoot himself. The whole is prefaced by an introductory essay, interspersed with a number of extended notes, and rounded off with three longer ‘dissertations’ on the following topics: ‘Were the Galatians Celts or Teutons?’, ‘The Brethren of the Lord’, and ‘St. Paul and the Three’. Essentially, the form of the commentary is like that of Bucer, which Calvin discussed, albeit Bucer with brevitas. It is a succinct paraphrase with appropriate intellectual justification, together with an examination of certain topics which seem to Lightfoot to be of special importance. ‘While it has been my object to make this commentary generally complete [i.e. to offer a continuous commentary on the text, covering all points], I have paid special attention’, he writes, ‘to everything relating to St. Paul’s personal history and his intercourse with the Apostles and Church of the Circumcision. It is this feature in the Epistle to the Galatians which has given it an overwhelming interest in recent theological controversy.’ The topics selected for the extended notes, that is to say, are not those which correspond most closely to the author’s intention in writing but those which relate to the needs of contemporary historical and theological debate. What are these topics? As well as matters relating to Paul’s personal history, e.g. his sojourn in Arabia, his various visits to Jerusalem, his infirmity in the flesh, there are linguistic notes: on words denoting ‘faith’, on the faith of Abraham, the meaning of Hagar in :, text-critical notes on :, :, :; and notes on Patristic readings of the conflict at Antioch and on Philo’s reading of the Sarah/Hagar allegory. They are, that is to say, in large measure historical and linguistic, and closely related to the topic which will form the subject of the last dissertation, the relationship between ‘St. Paul and the Three’: namely, James, Peter and John. It is not altogether easy to describe what is happening here. Lightfoot clearly wants to write a commentary which pays careful attention to what Paul says. In his review of ‘Recent Editions of St. Paul’s Epistles’ he had reviewed Jowett’s commentary critically, largely on the grounds that Jowett had not paid careful enough attention to ‘ordinary grammatical considerations’, while he commends Jowett’s essays and his attention there to questions such as: How has this or that metaphysical question presented itself to different minds, or to the same mind at different times? Under what contradictory aspects may a particular religious sentiment or moral truth be viewed? What phenomena does an individual mind exhibit at different stages in its growth? What contrasts do we find in the ancient and modern world of thought? (Lightfoot : –)

This is revealing in two ways: it shows clearly the value that Lightfoot puts on careful grammatical work in interpreting the New Testament, while also commending Jowett for raising questions about the meaning of the text and its

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relationship to modern thought which Lightfoot himself singularly fails to raise. Insofar as he does attempt to give a coherent account of Paul’s thought (as opposed to analyses of particular points in the detailed comments), then it is in the paraphrases, which frequently are quite full and betray their debt to a broad Protestant theology. Thus, in paraphrasing :–, he contrasts the Law with the dispensation of grace, seeing its inferiority in four points: it kills rather than gives life; it is temporary; it is mediated; ‘As follows from the idea of mediation, it was of the nature of a contract, depending for its fulfilment on the observance of its conditions by the two contracting parties. Not so the promise, which proceeding from the sole fiat of God, is unconditional and unchangeable’ (: ). One senses here a debt to Calvinist discussions of covenant theology, though the echoes are partial. Certainly, the whole note is more than a paraphrase, though it is included in inverted commas, to indicate that this is the equivalent of Paul speaking. I think it is not unjustified to see here the beginnings of a tendency in much English-speaking theology to paraphrase in terms which owe at least as much to certain traditions of Protestant theology as they do to the language of Paul, while not acknowledging the interpretative element in such rephrasing. Interestingly, in his article on recent Pauline commentaries, Lightfoot dismisses relatively quickly the work of Charles John Ellicott, another Cambridge scholar who had produced a series of ‘critical and grammatical’ commentaries in the s before moving on to become bishop of Gloucester. In the Galatians commentary he is more gracious: alongside Jowett, Ellicott, who has ‘subjected the Apostle’s language to a minute and careful scrutiny’ (Lightfoot : vii), is the countryman to whom he is most indebted. Ellicott certainly made no secret of his intention not to comment on the theological sense of the letters. His commentaries focused exclusively on text-critical and linguistic questions, not least on the specific character of Paul’s Greek, as opposed to that of the major classical writers. Exegetical questions were not for him: those who were interested in theological readings might consult the Anglican divines. There is clearly a recognition on Lightfoot’s part that such an approach is inadequate, but equally little indication of how he thought he could deal with the strictly exegetical task of expounding the meaning of the text for his contemporaries. He certainly does not follow the path of the church commentators by engaging in dialogue with accepted church interpretations. Instead, he simply breaks off the tradition of engaged dialogue with theological readings of Scripture which we shall plot in our commentary. Despite his deep knowledge of the tradition, he acknowledges his debt only to the Fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries (and among these, foremost, Jerome for his scholarly and critical comments). After these, he writes my obligations are greatest to English and German writers of the last few years. The period from the fifth century to the Reformation was an entire blank as



Introduction regards any progress made in the interpretation of this Epistle. And from that time to the present century, though single commentators of great merit have appeared at intervals, Calvin for instance in the sixteenth century, Grotius in the seventeenth, and Bengel in the eighteenth, there has been no such marked development of interpretational criticism as we have seen in our own time.

And he adds somewhat obscurely: ‘The value of Luther’s work stands apart from and in some respects higher than its merits as a commentary’ (Lightfoot : vii). To Luther he returns at the end of his preface: ‘[N]o man had a higher claim to a hearing on such a subject [the Pauline epistles]; for no man was better fitted by the sympathy of like experiences to appreciate the character and teaching of St. Paul’ (Lightfoot : x). What does he mean? What is it to say that from the fifth century to the present there has been ‘no such marked development of interpretational criticism as we have seen in our own time’? It can really refer only to developments in German scholarship, notably to those stemming from Baur and his school. In England there is only Ellicott and Jowett whom he acknowledges: Ellicott is, self-confessedly, not an exegete; Jowett raises the kinds of interpretative questions which, as Lightfoot acknowledges, need to be answered, but is in his view a poor commentator on Paul’s text, attributing a character of obscurity to Paul’s writing which Lightfoot rejects. That leaves Baur, whose historical reconstruction of early Christian history Lightfoot would spend much of his life (successfully) refuting and whose Idealist reading of Paul’s notion of Spirit gains hardly a mention in Lightfoot’s writings. Certainly Baur’s engagement with Hegel will strike few chords in the world of English-speaking biblical theology, just as, some hundred years later, Bultmann’s engagement with Heideggerian existentialism will find few advocates. What Lightfoot does see – and act on with huge concentration – is that Baur’s speculative theses about the development of early Christianity can be attacked with the very weapons of historical-critical study that Baur had himself helped to develop. Lightfoot is convinced that he has the means of overcoming those whose understanding of revelation is anathema to him, and his painstaking editing of the Ignatian epistles will prove him right. What he cannot accept is a view that sees religious insight and conviction as deriving from developments in earlier forms of belief. If the primitive Gospel was, as some have represented it, merely one of many phases of Judaism, if those cherished beliefs which have been the life and the light of many generations were afterthoughts, progressive accretions, having no foundation in the Person and Teaching of Christ, then indeed St. Paul’s preaching was in vain and our faith is vain also.

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Not only can he in no way entertain the idea that such beliefs are true, he is convinced that they can be refuted: ‘I feel very confident that the historical views of the Tübingen school are too extravagant to obtain any wide or lasting hold over the minds of men’ (Lightfoot : ix). But the means of refutation lie only in the kind of critical historical close reading of the texts which he had learnt as a classical historian, as had Baur. (His objection to Jowett’s commentaries is precisely that he does not apply the same rigour to the interpretation of a Pauline text that he would to a classical one.) Thus he sees himself as the defender of Christian orthodoxy against alien views of revelation, and in his concentration on this task he casts aside anything that cannot be of direct service to him – that is, as we have seen, most of the previous , years of commentary. The old tradition of inner-church dialogue around the meaning of Paul’s central theological utterances in Galatians is set on one side; a new dialogue is born, of historicalcritical scholars seeking to establish the truth about Christian origins and the precise contemporary meaning of Paul’s writing. This last point is important. In one sense, it comes as no surprise from a broadly conservative Protestant churchman like Lightfoot. The plain, literal meaning of the text is what can resolve disputes and buttress orthodox belief. But the search for the plain meaning is given a new dynamic by, on the one hand, Lightfoot’s turning his back on the tradition of church commentary and, on the other, by his insistence that the commentator must interpret exclusively with the tools of classical scholarship. We have seen earlier how Calvin wrestled with this problem, as he recognized that even among Reformed interpreters different interpretations of the same text could arise, and drew on the resources of humanist scholarship to resolve such disagreement. Here Lightfoot is even more radical: the accepted church readings provide no basis for arriving at the – single – meaning of the text. Equally, he reacts fiercely to Jowett’s suggestion that Paul’s Greek, due to the degeneracy of the Greek language of the time, is itself full of ambiguity, such that a purely scholarly reading would have to acknowledge the difficulties of finding a single meaning (Lightfoot : –). So is born the view that the plain, literal sense of the biblical text can be arrived at, not by the leading of the Spirit as Christians read the Bible together and church commentators dialogue with each other trying to articulate and tease out the Christian world view which they share, but by careful, dedicated historical-critical scholarship. This is certainly a massive sea-change, a fact clearly indicated by Lightfoot’s listing of his dialogue partners. But what of Jowett’s questions, which Lightfoot appears to affirm and then to leave unanswered in his own work? What are we to learn from Paul’s text about the metaphysical questions which intrigued the ancient classical writers and the world of classical Christian orthodoxy alike, the answers to which were so sharply criticized by Immanuel Kant (and others)? Lightfoot gives us only the

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Introduction

barest of hints, principally a cryptic reference to Luther, whom he omits from the list of post-medieval commentators of whom he approves, but ‘the value of whose work’ he acknowledges as standing ‘apart from and in some respects higher than its merits as a commentary’. This, coupled with the remark at the end of the preface about the ‘sympathy of like experiences’ which equipped Luther to understand the ‘character and teaching of St. Paul’, is some indication that Lightfoot found in a particular type of religious experience the interpretative key which could unlock the meaning of Paul’s letters. The problem, however, is how to identify such experience and to be sure that one has identified it correctly. It may be that Luther’s experience of release from the toils of a late medieval theology of penitence provided a legitimate parallel to Paul’s own experience but that claim has of recent years come under increasing fire. Lightfoot’s own attempts to identify the particular character of Paul’s own religious experience, are to be found in the extended notes, most notably in the note on Paul’s sojourn in Arabia, where he speaks of ‘a crisis which must have shaped the whole of his after life’ about which ‘absolutely nothing is known’ (Lightfoot : ). But this does not stop Lightfoot speculating and writing with great eloquence of Paul’s experiences in the Sinaitic peninsula. Here surrounded by the children of the desert, the descendants of Hagar the bondwoman, he read the true meaning and power of the law. In the rugged and barren region whence it issued, he saw a fit type of that bleak desolation, which it created and was intended to create in the soul of man. In the midst of such scenes and associations, his spirit was attuned to harmony with his divine mission, and fitted to receive fresh ‘visions and revelations of the Lord’. . . . St. Paul . . . was strengthened and sanctified for his great work, was taught the breadth as well as the depth of God’s wisdom, and transformed from the champion of a bigoted and narrow tradition into the large-hearted Apostle of the Gentiles. (Lightfoot : )

The debt to Luther is unmistakable; there may even be echoes of Baur. But it remains that the point at which Lightfoot begins to make the clearest links between Paul’s religious experience and the religious experience of Protestant Christians is the point at which strict historical controls are – largely – abandoned.

More recent work on Galatians Baur and Lightfoot bring us into a new era of interpretation of Galatians, one of great complexity, and one more familiar to contemporary readers and scholars. The dialogue partners of ‘the last few years’ for Lightfoot now extend (in

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theory at least) to those of the last  or more, and there is little sign of those earlier interpreters who formed an almost unbroken chain for , years being readmitted to the circle. Since the time of Baur and Lightfoot, the dominant paradigm for determining the true meaning of the biblical text has been a historical-critical one, and the only voices deemed worth listening to in such an undertaking are those of historical critics, though some scholars of the ancient world, such as Jerome and Chrysostom, may be allowed in by virtue of their linguistic and rhetorical knowledge. In this era too, the commentary remains an important vehicle for discussion of Galatians, though it is increasingly joined by the monograph, which may focus either on Galatians as a whole or on particular topics which are treated in Galatians, or may extend more widely to cover particular themes relating to Paul’s theology, the history or social context of his churches, or indeed to consider Paul as a whole. There is a clear sense in which the two main loci of Baur’s programme, the plotting of the development of early Christianity and the interpretation of Paul’s message/the identification of Paul’s central religious experience, continue to dominate scholarly discussion and endeavour. There are, that is to say, two areas of enquiry: the history of early Christianity and New Testament theology (Räisänen ). Baur’s Church History is clearly the foundational work for the writing of a history of early Christianity, attempting, as it does, to show how the movement developed from its earliest beginnings through the controversies which threatened to divide the early churches into the more stable forms of early Catholicism. Its successors are many, starting with his pupil Albrecht Ritschl’s Entstehung der altkatholische Kirche (), Wilhelm Bousset’s Kyrios Christos (; German ), Johannes Weiss’s Earliest Christianity (; German /). While Räisänen () argues that the project was largely abandoned in the wake of the Barthian movement of the s and s, this partially overlooks the way in which Baur’s project has been carried on in more detailed studies. The work of scholars like Theissen (, ) and Meeks () in attempting to locate the Pauline communities more closely in their social milieux is an extension of the kinds of concerns which moved Baur to ask about the formation of early Christianity, albeit concerns now informed by a very different kind of interest in social processes, as opposed to cultural dialectic. Both these scholars have, too, produced works which have looked at the development of Christian belief and practice across time: Theissen’s A Theory of Primitive Christian Religion () and Meeks’s The Origins of Christian Morality (). Such works are in many ways far removed from the commentaries which we have been discussing, for they subserve a quite different historical purpose: that of showing how a particular form of religious community, with its varied ethical and cosmological beliefs, emerged over the early centuries of our era in the Eastern Mediterranean. Such studies undoubtedly help to illuminate the beliefs which

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Introduction

Paul sought to give expression to in Galatians, even if they have a rather different (though not wholly unrelated) purpose in mind. The other strand which flows from Baur’s work is a more strictly theological one. Baur sought to articulate Paul’s beliefs in terms which were intelligible to the educated audience for whom he wrote, and in doing so he drew on the work of German Idealist philosophers, notably G.F. Hegel. Such moves, we have suggested, were necessary in the wake of Kant’s criticisms of traditional metaphysics, but should also be seen as continuing early traditions of articulating Christian belief in dialogue with the metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle. As Robert Morgan has argued (with John Barton : –), Hegel’s philosophy of history and religion made an excellent partner for Baur’s historical reading of Christianity. What is significant in scholars’ turning away after the First World War from attempts to write a history of early Christianity is that Bultmann (–) continues the search to find forms of contemporary philosophy in dialogue with which he can give authentic expression to the Christian gospel. Drawing on Barth’s theology of the Word, which saw belief as a response to a transhistorical word-event (a word, as it were, shot from across a river, whose impact one could experience, but whose source one could not plumb or explore), Bultmann attempted to give an account of Paul’s thought as primarily a form of theological anthropology. What is central to Paul’s thought is not the christological mythology (incarnation, pre-existence), traces of which may be found, but the exploration of the new self-understanding which is born in those who hear the Word and respond in faith, trusting in God and not in their own attempts to control their existence. In interpreting Paul’s anthropology, Bultmann drew deeply on his own work with Martin Heidegger (they had taught together in Marburg in the s when Heidegger was working on Being and Time). The result, most notably in his Theology of the New Testament (Bultmann ), was a work that was deeply Lutheran in inspiration, finding the heart of Paul’s gospel in his distinction between justification by faith and by works of the Law. This kind of Lutheran interpretation has in turn been the target of fierce attack since E.P. Sanders’s (b. ) Paul and Palestinian Judaism (), which accused the later Lutheran tradition of deeply misrepresenting Judaism as a religion of self-redemption and of offering a distorted picture of Paul as one who was seeking a solution to the religious plight in which he found himself as a Jew brought up in such a tradition. Paul, Sanders argued, was not seeking a solution to a plight, but rather was so overwhelmed by the new life which he found in Christianity that he was able to leave his Jewish traditions behind him. ‘The trouble with Judaism for Paul was that it was not Christianity.’ For Sanders, Paul was not so much interested in a new self-understanding which freed him from fear of the Law and the obligation to earn his salvation (that had never been a part of his religion anyway). What he found in Christianity was a new

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life made possible by his participation in the life of the risen Christ (another aspect of Luther’s theology, as we shall see). But, so Sanders, for such a matter we seem to lack an adequate category of ‘reality’ which ‘lies between naive cosmological speculation and belief in magical transference on the one hand and a revised self-understanding on the other’. And he adds: ‘I must confess that I do not have a new category of perception to propose here’ (Sanders : –). Nor does he offer any serious discussion of those who, like Baur and Bultmann, have employed such categories drawn from the work of contemporary philosophers. It is, equally, interesting to note how far Sanders’s account of Paul’s system of belief and of Palestinian Judaism avoids historical explanation of the development of Christianity out of Judaism. What he offers is, rather, a comparison of two patterns of thought, a comparison moreover which is careful to avoid judgements about the relative superiority of one over the other. Having argued that Paul’s system of thought is not derived from Palestinian Judaism, he offers a few speculations about the relation of Paul’s thought to Hellenistic thought but no explanation of Paul’s own change of religious allegiance. There may be particular types of religious experience underlying what he says, but such matters are ‘much more opaque to research’ than thought (Sanders : ). There is an intellectual asceticism, a spareness, about Sanders’s book which is part of its great attraction. He does not entertain the large hypothesis or speculate unduly about the origins and genesis of matters which he considers ‘opaque to research’. Others, however, have sought to answer the unanswered questions in Sanders’s book. What was Paul’s relation to Judaism, and how are we to explain his criticisms and sharp conflicts with the religion of his birth and upbringing? These are questions which press in on all those who live within the historicalcritical tradition, however difficult they are to answer. Daniel Boyarin, in an account of Paul’s thought which, as he acknowledges (Boyarin : ), has strong points of contact with Baur’s portrayal, ventures a cultural reading of the Pauline corpus which with nice self-ironization opens with an account of Paul’s conversion, as he muses on the oddness of belief in the Torah as the text of the ‘One True God of all the world, who created heaven and earth and all humanity, and yet its primary content is the history of one particular People – almost one family – and the practices that it prescribes are many of them practices which mark off the particularity of that tribe, his tribe’. Paul’s conversion consists in seeing in the sect of Christians that he was persecuting the ‘answer to the very dilemma’ that he was facing. ‘The birth of Christ as a human being and a Jew, his death, and his resurrection as spiritual and universal was the model and the apocalypse of the transcendence of the physical and particular Torah for Jews alone by its spiritual and universal referent for all’ (Boyarin : ) . In this fine study, Paul is reclaimed as a Jew, one who ‘represents the interface between



Introduction

Jew as a self-identical essence and Jew as a construction constantly being remade’. There is, hypothesizes Boyarin, in Paul an internal discourse, a dialectic ‘between powerful self-identification as a Jew . . . and an equally powerful, or even more powerful, identification of self as everyman’, something which ‘is emblematic of Jewish selfhood’. And Galatians is the text which expresses this tension most powerfully, with its radical declaration of the setting aside of all difference in Christ (Gal :) (Boyarin : ). Dunn sees less of the internal tension in Paul, portraying him as a Jew who is indeed critical of recent cultural tendencies within Judaism towards setting harsh boundaries between themselves and others. Those like Paul who believed that the end time had come with Jesus the Messiah now saw that the covenant law ‘should no longer be conceived in nationalistic or racial terms’. So that when Paul said (three times in Gal :!) that no one would be justified by ‘works of the law’, he was referring specifically to ‘Jewish observances such as circumcision, food law and sabbath’ which were seen as badges of Jewish identity, as identity markers. In this final stage of the covenant, God’s purpose had reached its intention ‘in which the more fundamental identity marker (Abraham’s faith) reasserts its primacy over against the too narrowly nationalistic identity markers of circumcision, food laws and sabbath’ (Dunn : –). The issue is thus less one about one’s cultural identity as a Jew, as a human being, as everyman, as Boyarin suggests, but rather as Krister Stendahl (b. ) had argued, that Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith was to be understood ‘primarily in the context of Paul the Jew wrestling with the question of how Jews and Gentiles stand in relation within the covenant purpose of God now that it has reached its climax in Jesus Christ’ (Dunn : , referring to Stendahl : passim, esp. ). These examples of recent theological interpretation of Paul must stand for a great deal more work which has been directed to correcting Christian views of Paul’s relationship to Judaism, which have, from the time of Chrysostom, often been tainted with deeply anti-Jewish sentiment. Boyarin’s and Stendahl’s treatments of the matter contrast with Dunn’s in one interesting respect. Both Boyarin and Stendahl are clearly addressing the Pauline texts as deeply problematical for their own cultural heritage: for Boyarin as raising difficult issues of cultural identity as a Jew, for Stendahl as sources of deep introspection and misery for Scandinavian Lutherans (Ingmar Bergman!). Neither makes any secret of the sense in which he writes out of engagement with his own cultural predicament (‘wrestling with Paul’; Boyarin : ). With Dunn, his own stance is no less clear: he writes as one who wishes to put off ‘the standard Protestant (mis)reading of Paul through Reformation spectacles’. Sanders’s reconstruction of first-century Judaism has given scholars an ‘unrivalled opportunity to shift our perspective back from the sixteenth century to

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the first century, to do what all true exegetes want to do – that is, to see Paul properly within his own context, to hear Paul in terms of his own time, to let Paul be himself ’ (Dunn : ). And yet, intriguingly, there is a sense in which his discussions of covenant theology have striking resonances with the Calvinist discussions which we noticed in William Perkins, just as in his portrayal of Paul and first-century Judaism ‘as themselves’, he sometimes has them speak confusingly in the language of twentieth-century social sciences. Quite clearly, however, Dunn shares the views of Lightfoot, after whom his chair was named, in believing, with Baur, that the only way to an understanding of the true meaning of what Paul says in Gal : is through a detached and careful historical reading of the text.

Concluding Remarks I hope this chapter serves both to introduce to the reader the commentators on Galatians whom I have chosen to emphasize in what follows and to indicate something both of the richness and diversity of the reception history of Galatians and of the extraordinary influence which it has had over the last , years. It is perhaps too easy for Christians to make such claims, so let me quote from the opening of Daniel Boyarin’s book: This book is a record of an encounter with some of the most remarkable texts in the canon of western literature, the letters of Paul. If one measure of the greatness of a work of literature is its ability to support many interpretations, then certainly these texts must rank among the very greatest of literature, for they have spawned and continue to spawn – anew every morning – not only new interpretations of particular passages but entirely new constructions of their complete thoughtworld. (Boyarin : )

Interpretations of Galatians have been at the heart of the development of Byzantine and Catholic theology and polity; Galatians was Luther’s favourite among the books of the Bible; his commentary had immense influence, not least in the English-speaking world. Calvinist theology grappled with Paul’s letter; Baur saw it as offering a window both into the controversies and development of earliest Christianity and into Paul’s self-consciousness as he was raised to a higher level of spiritual awareness. For Bultmann it gave insight into the renewed self-understanding of those who heard the Word with faith and provided a source of meaning in a world of emerging mass culture; in recent years it has been enabled Christians to review the ways in which they have constructed their picture of and relations with Judaism. What these readings

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Introduction

demonstrate perhaps above all is their perspectivalism. Here again Boyarin is worth quoting: Here, then, you have a talmudist and postmodern Jewish cultural critic reading Paul. I think that my particular perspective as a practising Jewish, non-Christian, critical but sympathetic reader of Paul conduces me to ways of understanding his work that are necessarily different from the ways of readers of other cultural stances. The text fits into the tradition, then, of what has come to be called cultural readings of the Bible, readings that are openly informed by the cultural knowledge and subject-positions of their producers. (Boyarin : )

For the most part, our commentators were not particularly conscious of the ways in which their cultural stance affected the way in which they have read the text; but they have been highly conscious of their position within a complex and rich tradition of readings of Galatians, and it has been in dialogue with that tradition that they have been enabled to arrive at new constructions of the thought-world of the text and, by extension, of the Christian traditions which they have inhabited. My hope is that as readers become acquainted with these extraordinarily diverse accounts of this letter from Paul to the Christians in Galatia, so the text will steadily come more sharply into focus, and its complexity, ambiguity and potential will become clearer with all their promise and possibilities, such that they too will be able to enter into the conversation. But, it might be asked (has indeed been asked), in what sense do I, as the author of this commentary, offer my own reading of this wonderful text? Certainly not in the sense that, having reviewed at least a selection of the most influential readings, I go on to offer one of my own. The various sections in the following commentary each end, it is true, with a brief survey of developments in the discipline over the  years or more since the publication of Lightfoot’s commentary, but not with a concluding paragraph setting out my views. Nor would I want them to. And this for two reasons. In the first place, if I wanted to give a contemporary view of Galatians, I would want to do so in a particular context. I would want to attempt to discover what it might contribute to the contemporary search for meaning, for ethical direction, for an understanding of what it is to be human and religious in a world of rapid change, where cultures intermingle as perhaps never before, where all certainties seem challenged, even the secularism which seemed so dominant  or  years ago. But that, it hardly needs to be said, is a task which could not be addressed in a few concluding reflections, though it is one in which one might hope to derive some assistance from an understanding of how others in the course of history have sought to derive insight and guidance from this letter for their own situations. It is, moreover, a task which, it seems to me, is quite distinct from the present undertaking.

Introduction



And this leads me to the second, major reason why I will not offer a few paragraphs setting out ‘my’ reading of the text. And it is simply that this whole present enterprise is itself an attempt to understand Galatians, to discover what it is about the text which can inspire so many and such rich readings, and which can bring new life into communities in greatly different situations. The portrayal of the literary history of a text like Galatians is itself an account of that text. It is in the attempt to depict and understand that history that we gain understanding, not in providing a brief summary of its major points. In a sense, the telling of a history like this is a little like staging a play, where the role of the producer or director is to draw out its meaning, as he or she allows the characters to interact and to play out their roles. It is not the role of the director to provide the audience with an account of what the play means, or indeed meant, but rather to allow the text of the play to come alive in the performances of the actors. Admittedly, the analogy breaks down in one obvious respect. What I am presenting is not a single performance of the text itself, as, say, Augustine’s or Luther’s commentaries are performances of the text; it is an account of the history of such performances. But then again, maybe that is not such a great difference after all: for what we will see is that, at least until the nineteenth century, each successive generation of commentators was in dialogue with its predecessors. What we have is a communal, dialogical reading of the text, where different voices speak from different perspectives, challenge each other, engage with each other, and think through the implications of what they severally say. The reception historian’s task, above all, is to allow this dialogue to be heard. And that is quite clearly more than a purely descriptive task; it is an interpretative one.

Galatians :– The Beginning of Paul’s Argument Literary and Historical Context of the Letter This section marks the beginning of Paul’s argument (in both senses of the word). It opens with an interestingly modified form of the standard epistolary greeting (: –; see Betz : , –; Stowers : –). As is usual, it gives the name of the writer and his companions, the names of the addressees and a salutation: each of these sections is used to develop points germane to the argument of the letter. Unusually, the salutation concludes not with a thanksgiving but with a doxology. Seemingly, there was not much to give thanks for. Verses – go on to set out Paul’s main charge against the Galatians, that they have rapidly abandoned the faith to which he had introduced them, and to pronounce a curse on anyone who preaches a gospel other than the true gospel which they have received (from him). Chrysostom refers to the opening simply Galatians Through the Centuries, First Edition. John Riches. © 2013 John Riches. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Galatians :–



as a ‘prooimion’, a term of wide usage, referring to the prelude of a piece of music or the preamble or preface of a poem or speech (NPNF ., translating prooimion as exordium). According to Plumer (Augustine : , see n. ), Augustine refers to the opening vv. – as a salutatio and vv. – as an exordium. Evidence of a close rhetorical analysis of Galatians among the Fathers is hard to find, and this may indicate that they would not have thought such analysis appropriate to Paul’s writings (Cooper ). The precise setting and occasion of Paul’s letter is not easy to determine, though the broad outlines are clear. Paul has recently founded the congregations to which he is writing. However, as Paul sees it, they have suddenly, under the influence of other teachers, started to abandon the faith that he taught them, which did not require strict obedience to the Law of the Old Testament, and to embrace a Law-observant form of Christianity. Who were Paul’s opponents who had disturbed (unsettled, confused, frightened) ‘his’ Galatians (:; :)? Paul associates them with the opposing party at Jerusalem, the ‘pseudo-apostles’ (:–;  Cor :; Marcionite Prologues in Harnack : *–*), with the ‘men from James’ (:) and with the group who sided with Peter in the controversy at Antioch (:–), referred to in the narrative in Acts  as the ‘men who came down from Judaea’. They were, on that reckoning, people who saw the preservation of the observance of the Law as essential for the maintenance of the true faith. For, as the fourth-century Latin commentator Ambrosiaster argued, they taught that ‘believers from the Gentiles, unless they were circumcized according to the law of Moses and judaised, could not be saved’. Thus they turned the gospel into ‘shifting traditions, that they might be Jews under the name of Christ’ (Ambrosiaster : ; cf. Luther : , ; LW ., ). Until the nineteenth century, interpreters were largely unanimous that those who were leading the Galatians astray were seeking to persuade the Galatians to embrace Judaism. Ignatius (Magn. .) writes: ‘It is monstrous to speak of Jesus Christ and to practise Judaism. For Christianity did not believe in Judaism, but Judaism in Christianity, wherein every tongue believed and was gathered unto God’ (Lightfoot : ). Paul’s reference to the Galatians having been called in grace, v. , is generally taken to be an allusion to the fact that the Galatians were exchanging a gospel of grace for one of salvation through ‘the law of works’ (lex factorum; so e.g. Ambrosiaster : ). The change made by the Galatians is described as one from the spiritual to the carnal (Augustine : ; Lombard, PL .A). Aquinas (: ; : ) contrasts the temporal and carnal goods of the old law with the celestial, spiritual and eternal goods of the new law. The Galatians make void (evacuare) the glory (Augustine’s variant reading of v. ) of Christ, by so valuing the circumcision of the flesh and other such works of the Law that they hold that they are salvific (Augustine : ). Such views were strongly affirmed by the Reformers.



Galatians :–

However, the Reformers disagreed about the role of the Law in the new life of faith in Christ, Calvin and his followers arguing, against Luther, that it had a continuing role in instructing and encouraging believers. The relation of emergent Christianity to its Jewish matrix was given fresh attention with the rise of historical criticism and its greater interest in the development of religious beliefs and communities. Baur and his school attempted to set Paul’s dispute with the ‘false apostles’ within the wider parameters of theological tendencies in the early church: there were two parties, the Petrine and the Pauline, with opposed views about the importance of observation of the Law. For Baur, the Petrine party was divided between the apostles, who reluctantly agreed to the Pauline mission to the Gentiles, and the more rigorist Jewish Christians who opposed Paul’s Law-free gospel and who were not reined back by the Jerusalem apostles (Baur : –, –, esp. –). Hilgenfeld emphasized the unity of the Petrine party more than Baur. The opponents must have ‘based the authority of this other gospel, which Paul condemns in :, , specifically on the authority of the first apostles, as those who had been instituted by Christ himself ’ (Hilgenfeld : ). Paul knew that ‘he shared the same foundation as his older colleagues in office, but only this foundation: for he no longer, like them, passes on the old with the new, righteousness of the law with the righteousness of faith, Jewish particularism with Christian universalism; he asserted the newness and independence of Christianity without any national Jewish limitations’ (Hilgenfeld : ). Such views were questioned by Lightfoot on the basis of Acts  with its account of the ‘going forth’ of the believers who had been formerly Pharisees from the apostles. For Lightfoot this is a group committed to circumcision which has no apostolic authority for its actions (Lightfoot : –). While all these commentators saw Paul as engaged in controversy with those who wished to contain the emergent community within the bounds of Judaism, they were in turn questioned, first by those who thought that Paul was fighting on two fronts (Lütgert ), against Law-observant Jewish Christians on the one hand and enthusiastic libertines on the other, then by those who believed that the opponents’ concern with the Law was derived from Gnostic beliefs about certain aspects of the Law only (Schmithals a). There is, however, little or no evidence of Gnosticism in Galatians, and more recent scholarship inclines to the view that the ‘opponents’ were Jewish Christian missionaries, engaged in mission to the Gentiles on their own account and coming into conflict with Paul because of their engagement in the same field (Martyn b: –). Some have thought that the opponents were in fact less than whole-hearted followers of the Law, who saw circumcision as a kind of mystical rite, but were otherwise not interested in the Law as such (Crownfield ). Others (e.g. Barclay : –) have suggested that the Galatians themselves

Galatians :–



may have felt a strong attraction to the Law. As Gentiles who had renounced the mores of the pagan world, they would have felt the need to replace them with a clearly defined code such as that offered by the Law (see Longenecker : lxxxviii–c for a full discussion of the debate). All of this remains somewhat speculative. However, if we assume that Paul’s letter, to a degree at least, meets and therefore reflects the theological positions and arguments of his opponents, then it seems difficult to deny that the opponents were strong proponents of the Law, whatever their more detailed emphases. This for Paul was tantamount to preaching another gospel, which was no gospel at all (:–). More recent debates among scholars have focused on the nature of Paul’s understanding of the relationship between the gospel he preached and the Judaism of his time. To what extent did Paul continue to consider himself a Jew and therefore obligated to follow Jewish customs? To what extent did he make a break with Judaism? In this enquiry, critical scholarship has particularly scrutinized the constructions of Judaism which underlay much historical work on Paul, notably in the Lutheran tradition (Sanders ). Lutheran readings of Paul, it is argued, have tended to project on to the Judaism of Paul’s day the theological characteristics of the Catholic piety against which Luther battled, ‘works-righteousness’. Sanders rejected portrayals of first-century Judaism as a religion of ‘self-redemption’, arguing that it was centred on God’s covenantal grace to Israel (‘covenantal nomism’). Entry to the covenant (‘getting in’) depended on God’s free election; continuance within the covenant (‘staying in’) depended on Israel’s obedience to the covenantal Law, which also provided means for dealing with transgressions of the Law. Paul abandoned such a religion in favour of a Christianity which stressed participation in Christ, a new religious relationship wherein obedience to the Law was replaced with a new relationship with Christ, whereby the believer dies to sin and lives in hope of resurrection (Sanders : ). Dunn, while basing his understanding of contemporary Judaism on Sanders’s work, has suggested that Paul was not making a complete break with Judaism and the Law, but rather attacking a nationalistic understanding of the Law, particularly associated with circumcision and the observation of purity rules about food (Dunn : –). Since the nineteenth century, there has also been much debate among scholars (see e.g. Lightfoot : –) about whether the congregations were to be found in the southern part of the Roman province of Galatia (Iconium, Lystra and Derbe) which, according to Acts, Paul visited on his first and second missionary journeys (Acts –; :–:), or whether, as had been almost universally held until then, they were located in the northern part in towns like Ancyra, Pessinus and Tavium, where Gallic invaders settled in the late third century BCE, an area which Paul visited only on the second and subsequent journeys (Acts :; :). The debate, which is well summarized by



Galatians :–

Longenecker (: lxi–lxxii) is finely balanced. As Lietzmann, after reviewing the contemporary linguistic evidence, remarked: ‘A review of the sources undoubtedly speaks more for the north Galatian theory, but I know that a few new facts (discovery of inscriptions, etc.) could completely change the picture’ (Lietzmann : ). Nevertheless, although it is almost impossible to reach secure judgements on this topic, careful, balanced scholars like Lightfoot and Lagrange (Lagrange ) invested huge amounts of time in the debate and saw its resolution as of great importance to their readings of the letter. They were strangely fascinated by the topic of national characteristics and made much of ancient writers’ views of the Gallic peoples in northern Galatia, which they believed were consonant with Paul’s portrayal of his addressees as foolish, fickle and impetuous (:; :). Their motivations in this were varied. Lightfoot wished to combat Baur’s view (Baur : –) that first-generation Christianity was polarized between Peter and Paul, between a Law-observant and a Law-free Christianity, for which fundamental division Galatians was a prime witness. He wished, by contrast, to show that Galatians was more a witness to fickleness and a certain type of religiosity (‘passionate and ritualistic’, Lightfoot : ), and that the errors of the Galatians were a special rather than a typical case of the divisions of the early church (Lightfoot : ), albeit ones which were carried on by a variety of heretical groups, Marcionites, Montanists, and even the wonderfully named Passalorynchites and Artotyrites, ‘the one so-called from their placing the forefinger on the nose while praying, the other from their offering bread and cheese at the Eucharist’ (Lightfoot : , n.  citing Jerome, ad Gal , praef. p. , ed. Vallarsi). Lagrange’s interests are more overtly nationalistic. Writing from Paris in , he draws analogies between the Galatians and the French, with their ‘mobility’, their past glories, then their apparent separation from God, and their present spirit of sacrifice ‘always aflame with love of Jesus Christ, always penetrated with the true spirit of religion which is sacrifice’, with that of ‘these sons of ancient Gaul . . . One can imagine all that Paul says to the Galatians,’ he concludes, ‘being said as easily to French people!’ (Lagrange : v). Much scholarly effort and historical zeal is expended in this wild chase for the national/cultural characteristics of the Galatians. Nevertheless, the question as to what extent Paul’s opponents stand for a particular tradition within Christianity is an important one, as is the further question, to what extent Paul’s counter-arguments themselves generate a further distinct tradition of Christianity, such as that noticed by Jerome above. By reacting strongly against those who insisted on Law observance, Paul may have encouraged a wider reaction against the Law and, as in the case of Marcion, against the ‘god of this world’.

Galatians :–



Main Themes: :– A number of major issues are raised in this opening passage which have occupied subsequent interpreters: (). Paul’s claim to be an apostle and his insistence on the truth of his Gospel; (). the understanding of evil and salvation suggested in v. .*



Paul’s Apostolic Authority

Patristic interpretation Paul introduces himself as an apostle ‘not from men nor through men but through Jesus Christ and God the Father’. Theodore (: .–) and Chrysostom (NPNF .), with their keen interest in the original context of the letter, see here an attempt on Paul’s part to counter charges by his opponents that he was a follower of the Jerusalem apostles. While this view is generally accepted, there is less agreement about the meaning of Paul’s claims. Is he claiming to be the equal of the apostles or, indeed, in some sense to be set apart from them and endowed with greater authority? The latter view creates two problems for mainstream/official interpretation: on the one hand, it concedes too much to Marcion, who had also sharply distinguished Paul who had the ‘word of truth’ (see the Marcionite prologue in Souter : ) from the apostles who had distorted the gospel; on the other hand, it may concede too much power and authority to those who appeal to their own inspiration and empowerment by the Spirit and so pose a threat to church order and hierarchical control. A number of interpreters then take the view that Paul is claiming to be on a par with the apostles. Pelagius asserts that Paul was not an apostle by ‘human presumption, as his opponents asserted, nor through the agency of other apostles, as Aaron was through Moses, but by the Lord himself like Moses and all the apostles and prophets’ (Souter : –). Chrysostom agrees that Paul’s call was like Peter’s, but adds that it was from the risen Lord (NPNF .). There are others who explore this kind of difference more fully and more dangerously. Victorinus asserts that Paul did not learn anything from Christ as man, but from Christ who was in man, ‘for Christ is both God and a human being’. Paul’s revelation from the heavenly Christ was unambiguously from God and not from Christ as * A further issue is doctrinal uniformity/conformity and the tolerance of difference, in vv. –; for details, see



Galatians :–

a human being, which is how some of the heretics understand him (Victorinus : ). Augustine, more boldly, distinguishes those who are sent by men, who are liars, those sent through men, who may speak the truth because the truthful God can commission people through the agency of men, and those sent by God, who speak the truth. And he goes on to distinguish the apostles who were sent by the man Jesus from the apostle Paul ‘who was sent through Jesus Christ now wholly God after his resurrection’ (Augustine : ). He does admittedly underline the fact that both the earlier apostles and Paul were truthful; but still the distinction remains and is available for exploitation. At the extreme end of this spectrum in the early period is the figure of Marcion, who believed that the apostles had distorted the tradition which they had received from Jesus and that it was only Paul’s letters and Luke’s Gospel which provided (albeit in the somewhat expurgated version which Marcion made of them) the true account of the message which Jesus brought from the unknown God. Similarly, the Gnostics maintained that the apostles had ‘intermingled the things of the law with the words of the Saviour; and that not the apostles alone, but even the Lord himself, spoke as at one time from the Demiurge, at another from the intermediate place, and yet again from the Pleroma, but that they themselves, indubitably, unsulliedly, and purely, have knowledge of the hidden mystery’ (Irenaeus AH ..; ANF .). Irenaeus comments: ‘this is indeed to blaspheme their Creator after a most impudent manner! It comes to this, therefore, that these men do now consent neither to Scripture nor to tradition.’ Marcion in v. , as Jerome tells us (PL .), omitted the phrase ‘and through God the Father’ and spoke of Jesus’s raising himself from the dead; otherwise he would have seemed to have accepted the unity of the creator God of the Law and the unknown God of mercy, who was revealed by Jesus Christ.

Thomas Aquinas These themes are developed in the Middle Ages and then surface critically in the claims and counter-claims of the various factions at the time of the Reformation. Thomas Aquinas, the Dominican friar-preacher, sees Paul as insisting on the authority which stems from his office as a preacher in order to crush the stupid and proud Galatians. Aquinas follows Augustine in distinguishing Paul’s commission by the risen Christ from the apostles’ by Jesus in mortal flesh. And he adds a little barb for those in positions of ecclesiastic authority (from whom he had had on occasion to suffer) that on papal bulls Peter is on the left (the side which represents the present life) and Paul, who was called by the risen Christ, on the right (representing the future life, which is heavenly and spiritual, Aquinas : ; : ).

Galatians :–



Plate  The seal (Latin: bulla) which was attached to Papal bulls or edicts, showing the heads of Paul and Peter with a cross between them. Paul is on Peter’s right hand. The saints’ names are abbreviated SPA and SPE. Courtesy Canterbury Archaeology Trust, photo Andrew Savage.

Reformation readings This identification of the Christian preacher with Paul is challenged by Luther, who insists that God ‘calleth in two manner of ways: by means and without means. He calleth us all to the ministry of his Word at this day, not immediately by himself, but by other means; that is to say, by man.’ This is directed against the ‘fantastical spirits . . . which either lurk in corners and seek places where they may pour out their poison . . . or else they resort thither where the Gospel is planted already’. He accepts that preachers may be called by others, but distinguishes the apostles and Paul from all others, in that they were called by Jesus Christ and God the Father. He, Luther, by contrast with the apostles but like the bishops who were called by the apostles, has a mediated calling, and is happy to be appointed by ‘the prince or other magistrate’. So Paul is reclassified, now again as one of the apostles. It is particularly important for Luther that such a mediated calling is localized, not universal: ‘it is not lawful for me to leave my appointed place as a preacher and go unto another city where I



Galatians :–

am not called, and there preach’ (Luther : –; LW .). This position was not altogether acceptable to the Reformed, those in the Calvinist tradition. Luther’s Elizabethan English translators omitted the passages just quoted. Calvin presents a more nuanced account: when Paul says that he is not called ‘from men’, he is speaking of the sense of vocation which is proper to ‘all true ministers in Christ’; when he says that he is not called through men, then he is speaking of the ‘highest order in the church’, of the apostolate. One problem here is that in Acts  Paul is commissioned by the church at Antioch. Calvin and others recognize the problem: Paul ‘did not want to exclude entirely the calling of that Church but merely to show that his apostleship rested on a greater and previous choice’. Even in his case, ‘the solemn rite of ordination was afterwards added’ (Calvin : –). So too here, there is no room for selfstyled apostles of the free spirit operating without the offical sanction of the church. By contrast, for the Anabaptists, the mark of true apostles is that they ‘have preached to us the true gospel, and beside this no other may be preached (Gal :)’ (Philips : ). The same argument, in an ethical mode, could be turned against the Lutheran authorities by Hutterites like Paul Glock. Objecting that Christ had not commanded his disciples ‘to force people to faith or infant baptism and put them in prison’, he concludes, ‘since I see you acting other than Christ your master or the apostles your predecessors, I will follow you less than him’. For, as he insists, ‘the disciples of Christ evidenced their office of apostleship with good works’ (Glock : ). Similarly, Pilgram Marpeck asserts that the ‘physical voice of Christ’ is still channelled through ‘men and the Scriptures’. Where this physical voice of Christ ‘is believed sincerely our spirit is free and the drawing of the Father revealed’. It is this Spirit of Christ which ‘possesses all power and authority, even unto the end of the world. . . . Such authority is committed to all true believers by Christ . . . Not all are apostles, not all are prophets, not all perform miracles, not all are teachers ( Cor :). But none of these gifts of faith will be lacking to the believers in their need.’ Such authority is not committed to any human institution, ‘to any creature in heaven or on earth, nor will it ever be. The Lord alone remains in power and glory forever. Therefore, Paul says ( Cor :): “Whoever glories let him glory in the Lord,” and it is not he who lives, but Christ who lives in him (Gal :)’ (Klaassen and Klaassen : –). This last passage nicely conveys the tension within Anabaptism between a belief in the gift of the Spirit to all true believers and a strong desire to test the spirits in order to discern who are the true apostles who speak with the ‘physical voice of Christ’. Institutional authority should play no part in this process of discernment; the fundamental question was whether a preacher’s doctrine and works agreed with Scripture and with Christ.

Galatians :–



Clearly, such radical doctrine runs counter to traditional views of the apostolic succession of bishops, as expressed by Jerome, ep.  (NPNF .) that bishops ‘hold the rank which these [the apostles] once held’. It should be noted, however, that he made the same claim for presbyters. Hooker took a similar position, but allowed that the apostles might be held to have no successors at all, in that they ‘were sent as special chosen eyewitnesses of Jesus Christ, from whom immediately they received their whole embassage, and their commission to be the principal first founders of an house of God, consisting as well of Gentiles as of Jews’ (Hooker : ii.). Puritans like Perkins, appealing to ‘the propertie of an Apostle to be called immediatly by Jesus Christ,’ denied the doctrine of apostolic succession unequivocally, and a fortiori denounced the ‘falshood that the Pope of Rome succeeds Peter in Apostolicall authoritie, and in the infallible assistance of the spirit, when he is in his Consistory’ (Perkins : ). Perkins insists, specifically against the Anabaptists, nevertheless, that ‘wheras Paul in the very forefront of his Epistle, begins with his owne calling, I gather, that every minister of the Gospel ought to have a good and lawful calling’. Such a calling is of God, and the church’s authority is no more than a ‘ministerie or service, whereby it doeth testifie, declare, and approove whom God hath called’. It therefore becomes important for him to set out the distinguishing marks of a true calling: that ‘must be manifest to their owne consciences, and the consciences of their hearers’. Knowledge that they are thus called depends on three things: the first is the testimony of their consciences, that they entred not for praise, honour, lucre, but in the feare of God, with a desire to glorifie him, and to edifie the Church. The second is a facultie to do that to which they have a desire and will. In this facultie are two things, knowledge of God and his wayes, and aptness to deliver that which they know. The third is the Ordination of the Church, which approoves and gives testimony of their wil and abilitie. (Perkins : –)

Significantly, there is nothing here about any spiritual experience of being called as such: the emphasis is on purity of will and ability to do the job.

Nineteenth-century readings Lightfoot does not engage directly in these controversies, but writes an extended historical note. For him the term ‘apostle’ has its roots in Jewish usage and signifies primarily a messenger. He doubts whether the term in early times was restricted solely to the Twelve and Paul. Barnabas is included along with Paul in the Lucan account of ‘his consecration to the office’ (Acts :–). Paul’s



Galatians :–

language in Gal : and  Cor : supports this view. The question, then, is what were the limits on this extension of the term. For Lightfoot the apostles ‘comprised the first order in the Church’, first both temporally as constituting with the prophets the foundation on which the church was built and first in terms of spiritual superiority over the prophets. What characterized the apostles was two things: first, that they had seen Christ and been a witness of the resurrection; second that they manifested the ‘signs of an apostle’ ( Cor :–), both ‘moral and spiritual gifts – patience, self-denial, effective preaching’ and ‘such powers as we call supernatural, “signs, wonders and mighty deeds”’. Such marks clearly allow for a relatively wide application of the term, and this use is to be found in the Apostolic Fathers and later church writers (Lightfoot : –). As his later essay on the Christian ministry shows (Lightfoot ), Lightfoot clearly distinguishes apostles as itinerants ministering to the church as a whole from bishops who emerged under the direction of the apostles from the presbyterate and who had a localized ministry. While he regarded the threefold ministry as ‘the completeness of the Apostolic ordinance and the historical backbone of the Church’ (Lightfoot : xii), he saw this as a practical development which in no way supported the kind of sacerdotalism which had later developed in the church, ‘which is in the fullest sense free, comprehensive, universal. . . . It has no sacred days or seasons, no special sanctuaries, because every time and every place alike are holy. . . . Each individual holds personal communion with the Divine Head. To Him immediately he is responsible, and from Him directly he obtains pardon and draws strength’ (Lightfoot : ). Similar views can be found in Hooker who, however, is at pains to stress the continuity between the role of the apostles and the bishops to whom the apostles gave episcopal authority (Hooker : ii.–, esp. –). Against all this concern with identifying the character and marks of the true Christian preacher must be set Kierkegaard’s dry entry in his Journal headed ‘An apostle in our day’: If I try to think of one in our day I think of him abstaining altogether from preaching in order, if possible, to draw attention to what it means to exist, preaching by giving self-denial existential expression, the imitation of Christ. And moreover how could he compete verbally with all these artists in rhetoric who now preach— and forget entirely about living. A man is castrated in order to make him into a singer who can take higher notes than any normal man can take: and so with these preachers: from a Christian point of view they are castrati, are deprived of their real manhood which is ‘the existential’—but they can take notes higher and more fascinating than any true Christian. (Kierkegaard : )

Galatians :–



Or again: Had St. Paul an official position? No. Had he any means of livelihood? No. Did he make a lot of money? No. Did he marry and have children? No. But in that case St. Paul cannot have been a serious man! (Kierkegaard : )



The Understanding of Evil and Its Overcoming

The long-drawn-out struggle between emerging Christian orthodoxy and various forms of dualism is one of the most important in the development of the culture of Christian East and West. Paul’s reference in v.  to ‘this present evil age’ would be a contested site for many centuries. Was he using the phrase metonymically, to refer to the evil deeds which were done in it by men and women (so e.g. Jerome, PL .; Chrysostom, NPNF .), or was he referring to the dark powers who rule over this present age and will ultimately be destroyed? Such a reading might be suggested by passages in the deutero-Pauline letters (Eph :; :); it was strongly taken up by Gnostics, Marcionites and Manichaeans, all of whom saw the world in different ways as being under the sway of forces opposed to the good God. So strong was the orthodox reaction to dualist readings of any sort that it was not till the discovery and dissemination of apocalyptic writings beginning in the nineteenth century that commentators again began to take seriously Paul’s engagement here with myths of the demonic rule over the world. For Wrede, Gal : becomes the prime text for an apocalyptic reading of Paul. ‘Redemption for Paul, to put it briefly yet concisely, is redemption from this whole present world. Any other way of putting it, for example, redemption from sin, would be too narrow’ (Wrede : ).

Dualist readings It is not easy to find direct examples of dualist readings of this passage, though the sensitivity with which it is read by more orthodox commentators, carefully guarding against dualist interpretations, is a fair indication that such readings were well known. Jerome on : says that ‘the heretics usually take this as an opportunity to assert that there are two creators, one of light and the world to come, another of darkness and the present age’ (PL .; Harnack, : *, thinks he is quoting Origen). But, as Harnack argues, this runs against Tertullian’s account of Marcion, who, according to him, distinguishes the just creator God of the Law who is the God of the Jews, from the good God of the



Galatians :–

gospel and Christianity (Marc. .) but does not claim that the one was a God of darkness and the other one of light (Marc. .). Readings of similar passages in Paul provide further clues as to the way this passage was read in dualist circles. Thus Faustus, in a passage in which he defends himself against the charge that the Manichaeans believe in two gods (arguing that they believe not in two gods, but in two opposed principles, good and evil, one which they call God and the other hulē), cites  Cor :, where Paul refers to the ‘god’ of this world who has blinded the minds of them that believe not. Paul ‘calls him God, because he would be so called by his worshippers; adding that he blinds their minds, to show that he is not the true God’ (NPNF .; Faust. .). Augustine in reply follows Irenaeus (AH ..; ANF .), in taking the phrase ‘of this world’ to relate to the unbelievers rather than God, further evidence that there is here a well-established tradition of combating dualist interpretations of these kinds of statement in Paul’s letters.

Patristic readings This impression of a care to guard against dualist readings is confirmed by Eusebius of Emesa, a semi-Arian of the fourth century. By speaking of the present age as evil, Paul indicates that evil is not unbegotten (agennēton) but rather temporary (proskairon), relating to the Galatians’ having allowed themselves to be persuaded to observe the Law in an untimely way (akairos; Staab : ). But this is not the only phrase that concerns him: Paul’s use of the strong word exelētai (take out, carry off ) is not without its problems, as it can easily suggest that the human predicament is such (because human beings are in bondage to overpowering forces of evil) that dramatic action on the part of God alone can bring rescue. Eusebius wants to assert both that such rescue was beyond the power of the Law and the prophets, and that nevertheless the divine action still involves the human will. Paul does not say ‘snatched us’ but ‘gave himself for our sins to rescue us out of the present evil age’, indicating that ‘we’ in some way participate in the process (Staab : ; Wiles :  n. ). Theodore is similarly concerned to deny that this verse should be taken to mean that ‘nature is either something evil or malign’, for an ‘age’ is not a nature (physis) that can be known as to its hypostasis, but rather a period of time. So Theodore distinguishes different ages, the first state when men and women were immortal, which was lost by sin; the present age, in which, because they can sin, men and women need the Law; and the coming age, when this arrangement (diataxis) will not be required ‘because we will be protected from all sin by the grace of the spirit’ (Theodore : , ). In the present age the weakness of our nature drags us down, but Christ by dying and rising grants us to partic-

Galatians :–



ipate in his resurrection and so frees us from the life of this present age (bios), and establishes us in the hope of the coming life of immortality, impassibility and sinlessness, something which the Law could not have offered us (Theodore : ). Thus Christ’s death and resurrection are seen as a means of combating the sinfulness and mortality of human nature brought about by the fall; participation in Christ’s risen life is the means of overcoming the human plight and attaining immortality and impassibility; a dualist cosmology is replaced by a salvation-historical one. Similar themes can be found in Ambrosiaster, who defines the evil of the present age as its failure to give due reverence to its creator and redeemer (Ambrosiaster : .–), and defines salvation as being rescued by faith in Christ (fides Christi) from the Law and being justified as sons of God by a second birth (Ambrosiaster : .–). However, this is interestingly combined with more dualist accounts of the human predicament and its resolution when he speaks of the human race being held ‘in the state of the devil’ (in condicione diaboli) and of Christ’s bringing back to his father the booty of the souls whom he has plundered from hell, something that the law could not do (Ambrosiaster : .–). With Augustine and Chrysostom the standard view emerges that the present world is understood to be evil because of the evil people who live in it’ (Augustine : ). Similarly, Chrysostom: ‘the evil world refers to evil actions and a moral principle’ (NPNF ., where he brings a few somewhat homespun arguments against dualism: evil cannot be the cause of good, but the present life is full of prizes and rewards; murderers would deserve a crown as rescuing us from evil; dualism cannot explain the existence of natural virtue). This view is firmly established in the medieval Western church (Lombard, PL .B; Aquinas : ; : ).

Reformation readings This dominance of the forensic view of evil over more dualist views begins to be unsettled in the outgoing Middle Ages. Erasmus, for all his humanism and good reason, still regards the human condition as one of bondage: ‘after we had fallen back into another’s power by our own sin, we have once again been claimed as his own, and as it were, reborn, for we have been made heavenly creatures though formerly of the earth, and have been rendered spiritual though formerly carnal’ (Erasmus : ). Luther’s view is far less restrained: Paul calls this present age evil because everything in it is ‘subject to the malice of the devil reigning over the whole world’. The world is the ‘kingdom of the devil’, and all who are in the world (referring to  Jn :) ‘are the captive members of the devil, constrained to serve him and do all things at his pleasure’. So



Galatians :–

long as one is in the kingdom of Satan, and not in the kingdom of Christ, then all one’s works, however religious, are ‘but the slavish instruments of the devil’ (Luther : –; LW .). Calvin, who follows the lines of Luther’s commentary here quite closely, preserves the latter’s sense of the futility of all human efforts, but ultimately draws back from his strong cosmological dualism. ‘World’ here signifies ‘the corruption which is in the world’, and he cites  Jn :, ‘the whole world lieth in the evil one’, and Jn :, which are (both) taken to refer to the power of the evil one. However, he sees the term ‘world’ as having a different sense in this context, where it refers to people’s separation from the kingdom of Christ and their living to themselves. ‘For so long as a man lives to himself he is altogether condemned.’ It is in this latter sense that the world is called evil, to indicate that the corruption stems from sin and not from God’s creation. But such corruption is total (as total as if it were the result of our bondage to the devil?): ‘there is nothing in us but unmixed wickedness (pure malice). We are of the world, and until Christ rescues us from it, the world reigns in us and we live unto it’ (Calvin : ). Even Calvin cannot avoid hypostasizing the world, if he is to underscore the totality of human corruption. Whatever account the Reformers offered of human failure, their insistence was clear: it was total and undermined all human claims to religious, moral and other forms of excellence. It represented a total rejection of all claims that excellence and virtue could be achieved in public life. This can be seen very clearly in Perkins: ‘And whereas Paul cals this world an evill world, hee doeth it to signifie that there is nothing in men but sinne, till they be regenerate, yea that civill vertues, and civill life, that are excellent in the eyes of men, are no better then sinnes before God. It is the errour of the Papists, that men may thinke and do some thing that is morally good without grace’ (Perkins : ). For Barth the choice for the Galatians is between Paul’s preaching of justification, which is a way which leads to confrontation with the world and a way which involves accommodation with the evil age (arge Welt), a way which he characterizes (characteristically) as ‘a Christianity built into the system of human self-justification, a domesticated Christianity which has been turned into a “religion”’. The choice here is ‘Christ or not-Christ’ or indeed – he notes approvingly – as Luther ‘boldly but surely not incorrectly has it, between Christ and Belial’ (Barth : ).

The modern period Whereas Calvin channels interpretation of the notion of evil in the epistle in a broadly forensic direction, which was subsequently dominant in both Lutheran and Calvinist interpretations, historical-critical studies in the nineteenth cen-

Galatians :–



tury began to reverse this. Scholars increasingly saw the need to interpret Paul’s letters in the light of contemporary beliefs about the nature of evil and God’s plans for overcoming it contained in the apocalyptic literature of the turn of the era. These are writings which record visions and auditory revelations given to seers (often identified with figures from the age of the Patriarchs) which reveal God’s (otherwise) hidden purposes for his world. In such writings the world is frequently portrayed as under the sway of demonic powers which can be broken only by divine intervention, often culminating in some final cosmic battle, preceded by a time of great suffering. Meyer (: ) translated aiōn anestos as ‘the period of time which is already in the act of setting in, the evil time which has already begun, that is, the time immediately preceding the parousia, the time, that is, of the messianic woes.’ In this way ‘the present age’ is to be understood specifically as the last part of ‘this age’. However, while most historical critics agreed in seeking a broadly apocalyptic sense for the expression, Hilgenfeld, Lightfoot and others took the phrase as equivalent to aiōn houtos, referring, that is, to ‘the present world-age (Weltzeitalter) as a whole’ (Hilgenfeld : , citing Ps. Clem. Hom. ., , , , , etc.). This is called evil, ‘not in virtue of the corruption reigning among people’, but because of ‘the suprahuman powers reigning in it’ (in ihm herrschenden übermenschlichen Potenzen; Hilgenfeld : , referring to  Cor :,  Jn :, followed closely by Lightfoot : ). Bousset too sees here the influence of ‘late Jewish theology’, and argues that Paul modifies Jewish expectations of a future liberation by ‘linking it causally’ with the liberation from sin which had occurred in Jesus’s death. As a consequence, believers experience ‘in the possession of the Spirit a first part of that invisible world in the middle of the misery of this world (Gal :;  Cor :; :; Rom :).’ In this way the contrast between a present and future world yields to that between two worlds, one above the other, a higher, spiritual one and lower, visible world. Together with his emphasis on redemption, Paul thus adapts his gospel to the ‘thought and sensitivities of his Greek believers’. There is, for Bousset almost a sense of cultural determinism about these developments in early Christian theology. ‘The gospel could hardly have found effective form if not in this manner, that is in Paul’s preaching of redemption through the cross’ (Bousset : –). Thus Bousset takes up the challenge of offering a contemporary interpretation of an apocalyptic reading of Galatians, which, while recognizing its cosmic-dualistic roots, attempted to show how Paul had moved away from them into a cosmology wherein the eternal is contrasted with the material and transitory. The twentieth century saw a number of major contributions to this task: Bultmann’s existential interpretation of Paul, his pupil Schlier’s commentary on Galatians which elaborates Bultmann’s reading, and more recently the commentary of J.L. Martyn. Bultmann in his section on the understanding of



Galatians :–

human existence before the revelation of faith, discusses the notion of kosmos in terms both of a sphere of human activity which is heading for its end and of powers opposed to God to which men and women are in bondage. But, as he insists: ‘This power, however – and this is the distinctive thing about Paul’s view – does not come over man, either the individual or the race, as a sheer curse of fate, but grows up out of himself ’ (Bultmann : ). For Schlier, the fact that Christ dies to ‘tear us out’ of this present evil age expresses the power that this age has to bind people to it. Specifically, it is through ‘our sins’ that we are bound to this age: for they are nothing but ‘various forms of our dedication and voluntary-involuntary bondage to the present world-age which overwhelmingly threatens and lures us’. Thus Christ’s eradication of our sins, sets us free from the power of this world and opens up the new age for us (Schlier : ). Sanders returns to a more explicitly apocalyptic reading of the passage: ‘Christians are delivered from the evil aeon. Thus the purpose of Christ’s death was not simply to provide expiation, but that he might become Lord and thus save those who belong to him and “in” him’ (Sanders : ). Similarly, for Martyn, Paul opposes the forensic eschatology of the ‘teachers’ which saw the cause of this world’s ills as lying in human disobedience and its remedy in renewed observance of the Law. Instead, he proclaimed the dawn of a new age which had broken the grip of the foreign powers which held human beings enslaved (Martyn : –; –). Dunn, while giving a full account of the apocalyptic roots of the expression ‘evil age’ offers a reading closer to Calvin and Bultmann: ‘Christ’s death was the key to deliverance from the seductive and corrupting introversion of this age’s self-delusion, since by his death he broke both the power of sin and the power of death’ (Dunn : ).

The ‘Conversion’ of Paul the Jew

Galatians :–

Paul Argues for His Independence as an Apostle (I)

Main Themes There is widespread agreement among commentators of all times that Paul here is principally answering charges that his Law-free gospel to the Gentiles is contrary to the teaching which he received from the apostles, which, by contrast, his opponents uphold. Paul’s response to this is to assert that he received the gospel by revelation and that he did not receive it from human authorities such as the apostles. This involves him in a narrative which gives an account of his early years as a Jew and his conversion (vv. –), his early ministry, and his dealings with the apostles (:–:). While this is generally agreed, there are nevertheless interesting differences in the way a number of topics are addressed: () How does Paul present the relation between the Judaism in which he grew up and his new-found faith? Galatians Through the Centuries, First Edition. John Riches. © 2013 John Riches. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Galatians :–

For the earlier commentators, at least, there is a knife-edge to be trodden here. If they overstate the contrast between the two, then they are in danger of conceding too much to Marcion, with his doctrine of two gods, one of the Old and one of the New Testament. If they bring the two too closely together, they are in danger of weakening Paul’s case against the false apostles. Some later commentators (Baur, Harnack!) are more in sympathy with Marcion and less inhibited in their accounts of Judaism. () What account are we to give of Paul’s conversion and what weight, more generally, are we to place on Paul’s particular understanding of the faith (‘his’ gospel) in the development of early Christianity? () What account do commentators give of the divisions within early Christianity documented here? Is it simply a question of error on the part of the false apostles, who have misunderstood the ‘true apostles’, or is there a more deep-seated division between Paul and the Jerusalem apostles which is shown up particularly in the later conflict at Antioch? Again, the figure of Marcion looms over this discussion and strongly discourages (but not he alone!) pre-critical commentators from drawing out the differences between Paul and Jerusalem too sharply. We shall deal with this third issue more fully in the commentary on chapter .



Paul’s Relation to Judaism

There are sharply divergent views across the reception history of Galatians about the nature of the contrast that Paul is making in vv. – between Judaism and Christianity. Marcion had distinguished the creator God, who gave the righteous Law of the Old Testament but administered it without mercy, from the good, righteous and merciful God of Jesus. The Law of the Old Testament was not in itself to be rejected; it is the manner in which it is administered by the creator God which makes it harsh (Harnack : –, esp. ). On this view, the Jews are indeed the creator God’s favoured people who may reap the earthly benefits of his rule but who nevertheless have to endure their God’s cruel rule. Orthodox interpreters must lay the blame for the suffering of the Jews elsewhere. For the Gnostics, the Jews symbolized the ‘psychics’ (the unspiritual ones, as opposed to the ‘pneumatics’, the spiritual ones) who worshipped the demiurge ‘in flesh and error’ (Pagels : , citing Origen CJ .). Augustine speaks of Paul’s former way of life as fleshly and carnal, understanding by this not the Law itself, which was spiritual, but rather the traditions of his fathers: it was the Jews’ ‘carnal and slavish way of life’ which led him to persecute the church. Thus, when Paul speaks about being separated from his mother’s womb, he speaks figuratively, meaning that he was separated from the

Galatians :–



‘blind custom of one’s carnal parents’ (Augustine : –). This is in fact a rather forced introduction of the concept ‘flesh’ at this point, for the phrase ‘did not confer with flesh and blood’, as many other commentators have pointed out, probably means no more than that ‘he simply wanted to exclude all human counsels’ (so e.g. Calvin : ; Lagrange : ). Augustine can invoke the flesh/spirit distinction here without running the risk of endorsing Marcionism only by identifying the ‘traditions of my fathers’ with the oral tradition and making a sharp distinction between them and the – spiritual – Law. However, for others, like Luther and Calvin, Paul is not speaking here of ‘pharisaical or human traditions’ but of the Jewish religion as based on the Law. Paul’s former life was under the Law, so that he calls ‘even that holy law of Moses, the fathers’ traditions’ (Luther : , referring to Phil ). The Law ‘showeth forth sin, terrifieth the conscience, revealeth death, the wrath and judgment of God and hell’, whereas the Gospel admits no law and must be ‘separate as far from the law, as there is distance between heaven and earth’. For the gospel is a doctrine concerning Christ, ‘who is assuredly neither law nor work, but our righteousness, wisdom, sanctification and redemption’ ( Cor :; Luther : ; LW .). Calvin simply says that it would have required a miracle to tear Paul from the Law of God in which he had been educated from his childhood (Calvin : ). His later followers, however, turn back from this equation of observance of the Law with spiritual bondage. For Perkins, Paul’s profession before his calling was in Judaism, which he identifies principally with Pharisaism. Among its many errors was the belief in the earthly nature of the Messianic kingdom, an emphasis on the external keeping of the moral law, belief in the freedom of the will and in justification by works of the Law, without the obedience of the Messiah, together with the precise observance of many unwritten traditions, which they ‘accounted the worship of God’. ‘It may further be demanded, how the Jewes could hold such hereticall, and damnable opinions, and yet be the people of God?’ exclaims Perkins. They had forsaken God, but God had not forsaken them, is the answer. Nevertheless, as they had loved neither the Law nor the prophets, ‘God in judgement left them to the blindenesse of their owne mindes, and hardnesse of their owne hearts’ (Isa ). It is lack of love for the Law which brings their just fate upon them, just as lack of love for and obedience to the gospel could lead to ‘our religion end[ing] in ignorance, superstition, and prophanenesse, as theirs has done’ (Perkins : –). A significant further twist in this trajectory occurs with Baur and his school. Baur speaks now in racial terms of the ‘grossness of this people’s perversity; ingratitude and disobedience, with that overwhelming bias towards materialism which the people had always manifested, must really have been their truest and most characteristic nature’ (Baur : –), and suggests that the reason why Paul’s opponents’ position was so narrow was because of their ‘natural incapacity



Galatians :–

to raise themselves from a lower state of religious consciousness to a higher and freer one’ (Baur : ). Hilgenfeld indicates clearly that, from his history of religions perspective, the religion of law, which empirically is found only in Judaism, has a ‘universal human meaning’, representing pre-Christian religion as a whole (überhaupt; Hilgenfeld : ). It represents, that is to say, religion which is still particular, ethnic, as opposed to universal. And he speaks of the ‘unity of the Jewish and the ethnic as contrasted with Christianity’ (Hilgenfeld : ). Here the condemnation which the Puritans had reserved for Pharisaic religion is turned on the religion of the Law as a whole, as the particularistic religion of the Law is contrasted with the universal religion of Christianity. An interesting dialogue with this tradition of Pauline interpretation by a Jewish scholar who reads Paul as a cultural critic of his day is to be found in Boyarin (). Others, however, have been concerned not to show Paul as condemning Judaism/the Law outright in his references to his former life. Theodore of Mopsuestia (somewhat after the manner of E.P. Sanders’s mot ‘this is what Paul finds wrong in Judaism: it is not Christianity’ (: ) says simply that Paul did not want to scorn the Law, but recognized and chose what was better (Theodore : ). Thomas Aquinas (: –; : ), while agreeing with Augustine and the Glossa (Lombard, PL .) in identifying the ‘traditions of my fathers’ with the oral tradition, sees them as having positive value: as traditions ‘which the good fathers added’. But then, says Aquinas, it could be asked in what sense they were good, if, as Deut : has it, one should not add to the word which God speaks. This means, he says, that one should not add anything contrary or alien to the words of God; one may, however, add things which are not such: e.g. some solemn days. This is to allow tradition a proper place within the development of the life of the believing community, albeit one which is here clearly subordinated to Scripture. E.P. Sanders famously attacked the Lutheran tradition of Pauline interpretation, with its theological rejection of Judaism as a ‘religion of the most complete self-redemption’ (Strack and Billerbeck : , in Sanders : ), and proposed instead that Judaism should be seen as a religion based on God’s grace in calling Jews into the covenant. The Law was there to regulate the relationship between God and his people. Sanders described this as covenantal nomism, ‘the view that one’s place in God’s plan is established on the basis of the covenant and that the covenant requires as the proper response of man his obedience to its commandments, while providing means of atonement for transgression’ (Sanders : ). Dunn, like Perkins, sees Paul here as not departing from Judaism as a whole, but rather parting company with a particular form of Jewish belief and practice, indicated by the use of the term ‘Judaism’. This had emerged at the time of the Maccabean revolt, ‘a fact which stamped its character as fiercely nationalistic and loyal to the law, in reaction to those who attempted to eliminate its distinctiveness (as expressed particularly

Galatians :–



in its sacrificial system, its feasts, circumcision and food laws)’. The corollary of this is that Paul is seen not as converting from Judaism to Christianity but from one ‘Jewish movement, the Pharisees, to another, the Christians’. Dunn does, however, allow that there is a difference in emphasis between the nationalistic fervour of those who insisted on the outward marks of Jewish identity and the Pharisaic concerns to ‘live in accord with and to defend as necessary’ the oral traditions (Dunn : –). These discussions make clear how difficult it is to decide whether what Paul is separating himself from is a particular form of – nationalistic, legalistic? – Jewish belief and practice, or the Law together with its traditions of legal rulings which form an integral part of any system of law.



Paul’s Conversion

What light does this passage shed on Paul’s conversion, on the nature of his life before his conversion, on the circumstances of his embracing Christian faith, on the nature of the change which occurred in his life?

The patristic and medieval period The Valentinians took the phrase about Paul’s being separated from his mother’s womb to refer to the separation of the psychic, outer person (anthrōpos) from the pneumatic, inner one. It was one person ‘who had been born from the womb, and another who preached the Gospel of the Son of God’ (Irenaeus, ANF . –; AH ..). For Chrysostom, portraits of Paul play a central role in his life-long engagement with Paul’s writings (Mitchell ). Galatians provides Chrysostom with the bare bones of his account: Paul’s sudden conversion in response to divine revelation, sobering him at the height of his madness against the church; his zeal, which, though misplaced, was nevertheless deeply religiously motivated and not driven by vainglory (NPNF .). Acts provides him with the colour for his portraits of Paul’s conversion and his persecution of the church. He was like a wild beast, dragging out men and women (PL .), a wolf who was about to become a shepherd (PL .). As soon as he converted, he shook off his ‘Jewish prejudices, manifesting . . . a zeal still more ardent’ (NPNF .). Indeed, so ardent was Paul’s zeal and so complete his conversion, that from that point onwards he committed no further sin (compunct, . (PL .) in Mitchell : , –). But while Chrysostom often deploys such portraits of Paul to encourage his hearers to imitate Paul, in the commentary on Galatians the emphasis is more on Paul’s



Galatians :–

own rhetorical purpose: namely, to give proof of his calling and instruction by God. Such an extreme reorientation, Paul is arguing, could have been brought about only by God and must have been associated with a change of understanding which required a deep reorientation of his mind; ‘he had not only been instructed in the faith by words’; he was also ‘richly endowed with the Spirit’. Here Chrysostom takes ‘revealed his Son in me’ to indicate that ‘the revelation had enlightened his whole soul and that he had Christ speaking within him’ (NPNF .). As regards Augustine, contrary to what one might expect in view of the way he is often portrayed as the prime instigator of the ‘introspective consciousness of the West’ (Stendahl : –; Fredriksen ; contra Riches ), there is in his Galatians commentary little interest shown in Paul’s interior state prior to his call. Augustine takes ‘who separated me from my mother’s womb’ to mean ‘being parted from the blind custom of one’s carnal parents’. Trust in flesh and blood means ‘assenting to carnal advice from one’s carnal family and relatives’ (Augustine : ). Conversion, that is to say, is not so much a release from the torments of introspective guilt as a break with inherited group norms and values, having one’s eyes opened where formerly one had been blind. Aquinas assembles a number of interpretations of this phrase: it can be taken either literally, referring to birth and hence to God’s hand in all that Paul does (Aquinas : ; : ); or it can be taken metaphorically to refer either to Paul’s separation from the synagogue and specifically from the Pharisaic party, or to his separation from the college of the apostles in his role as apostle to the Gentiles. Aquinas believes that ‘mother’ here refers to synagogue (Aquinas : ; : ). It was from this womb that Paul was separated by the Holy Spirit for faith in the gospel (Rom :). Aquinas certainly has an interest in the call and revelation which Paul received. He distinguishes the revelation from Paul’s call: the revelation occurred when he was taken up into paradise where he heard hidden words which it is not permitted to speak ( Cor :; Aquinas : ; : ). His call occurs externally through the voice on the Damascus road (Acts :) and internally through a ‘certain interior instinct whereby God touches the heart by grace, that it may be turned towards him’ (Aquinas : ; : –). And Aquinas agrees with Chrysostom that the ‘manner of his conversion is perfect’ both as to its effects and as to Paul’s understanding. For Aquinas, ‘conferred not with flesh and blood’ means that ‘all carnal affection (affectus) left me’, taking ‘flesh and blood’ to refer to carnal vices. Paul’s instruction by Christ perfectly informed his mind, in such a way that he had no need of instruction from the apostles (Aquinas : –; : ).

Galatians :–



Reformation readings Luther’s account of Paul’s conversion is altogether more personal, interwoven with reflections on his own history. Just as Paul was zealous for the traditions of his fathers, so too Luther was ‘zealous for the papistical laws and traditions’ of his. This was a sincere faith: ‘whatsoever I did, I did it with a single heart, of a good zeal, and for the glory of God.’ But (with echoes of Phil ) ‘those things which then were gainful unto me, now with Paul I count to be but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Jesus Christ my Lord’. In his monkish life, ‘he crucified Christ daily’. While outwardly his life was one of chastity, poverty and obedience, nevertheless, ‘under this cloaked holiness and trust in mine own righteousness, I fostered continual mistrust, doubtfulness, fear, hatred and blasphemy against God. And this my righteousness was nothing else but a filthy puddle, and the very kingdom of the devil’ (Luther : –; LW .–). And all this, as with the apostle, was foreordained before his very birth, taking ‘from my mother’s womb’ as a Hebrew phrase meaning ‘which had sanctified, ordained, and prepared me. . . . Thus Paul cutteth off all deserts, and giveth glory to God alone, but to himself all shame and confusion’ (Luther : ; LW .). Luther’s emphasis is on the unmerited mercy of God as contrasted with his own best religious efforts and endeavours. Calvin, commenting on v. , is concerned to clarify what might seem to be a contradiction between his own emphasis on and understanding of predestination and the passage here with its emphasis on Paul’s calling and change of heart. There are three steps in God’s appointing Paul to his apostolic office: God’s pleasure, expressed in his eternal predestination; destination from the womb; and the calling ‘which is the effect and fulfilment of both’. Invoking Jer :, he explains, ‘for when he was not yet even begotten, God had sanctified Paul to the office of prophet. But He is said to separate us from the womb because we are sent into the world for this purpose, that He may accomplish in us what He has decreed.’ There is, as well as the divine act of creation of the individual soul, an eternal decree, by which God has determined ‘what He would do with every one of us and ha[s] assigned to everyone by His secret counsel his part in life’ (Calvin : ). What Paul is specifically referring to here is the moment at which God as it were actualizes such a decree and sends Paul into the world. Calvin’s concern is to safeguard his own emphasis on the eternal predestination of God. The three phrases: God’s pleasure, separation from his mother’s womb, Paul’s calling, refer to three stages in God’s execution of his eternal purpose. Calvin’s practical application of this is not to illuminate his own experience of conversion, but rather, more generally, to caution humility on the part of all who hold office in the church; it is ‘entirely the gift of God and not the fruit of our own efforts that we have been called to govern His Church’. He is also keen to attack Thomists



Galatians :–

who understand the Christians’ separation from others in terms of God’s infusion into them of a distinct habitus, a moral habit or cast of mind, which shapes and guides their behaviour. We are distinguished by virtue of God’s choice, not by some internal or ontological change (Calvin : ). Perkins develops Calvin’s thoughts further, not least in the light of subsequent controversy with the theologians of the Council of Trent, who had given little place to the doctrine of predestination in the decree on justification but had condemned the ‘rash presumption of one’s own predestination’ (Neuner and Dupuis : ). Perkins follows Calvin in identifying three causes of Paul’s conversion, each relating to the three phrases in v. : God’s good pleasure; separation, or election to eternal life; vocation by the Word and Spirit; but he further adds ‘obedience to the calling of God, and after obedience, everlasting life’, in order to set out the efficient causes which operate in the ‘conversion and salvation of every sinner’. This has, for Perkins, a number of distinct merits. Among these are that works have ‘the last place’ (Perkins : ), whereas God’s initiative is primary and indeed all-triumphant. Thus he rejects scholastic doctrines which link God’s predestination of individuals to his foreknowledge that they will do good works: ‘it must be Gods pleasure, that man shall doe a good worke before he can doe it’ (Perkins : ). God acts violently towards Paul, not by ‘abolishing all consent of will’ but by drawing out a ‘consent from the wil, by causing it of an unwilling will, to become willing’ (Perkins : , citing Jn :). In the end, Paul could not have resisted (Perkins : ). Moreover, contra Trent, this order of salvation provides ‘assurance of our election’, for our election is founded in the vocation of God, and ‘if thou hast bin called, and hast in truth answered to the calling of God by obedience, thou maiest assure thy selfe of thy separation from the womb to everlasting life, because this order is (as it were) a golden chaine, in which, all the linkes are inseparably united’ (Perkins : ). Perkins further questions what the efficacy is of ‘preventing grace’, the grace that precedes human response and action. Trent taught that ‘those who through their sins were turned away from God, awakened and assisted by His grace, are disposed to turn to their own justification by freely assenting to and cooperating with that grace’ (Neuner and Dupuis : ). Such grace, that is to say, assists sinners in freely accepting God’s call. Perkins rejects the notion that God inspires ‘good motions and desires into the heart of Paul’. This is false because ‘the heart is uncapable of any good desire of purpose, till it be regenerate’ (Perkins : ). God first revives us that he may then infuse such motions into the heart. Only at this point can we speak of ‘co-operation of man’s will with God’s grace’ (Perkins : ). In what sense, then, is God’s prevenient grace effective? Trent, so Perkins, had taught that ‘it stands in the event, in that the will of man applies itselfe to the grace which God offereth. But then the efficacie of grace must be from man’s will: and then man hath something whereof to boast.’ But the truth is that

Galatians :–



outward meanes are effectual, because they are joyned with the inward operation of the spirit. Inward grace is effectuall, because God addes to the first grace, the second grace. For having given the power to beleeve and repent, he gives also the will and the deed: and then repentance and faith must follow. And herein stands the efficacie of the first grace, that God addes unto it, and workes the will and the deed, Phil. .. (Perkins : –)

While, in view of God’s omnipotence, Paul could not have resisted God’s call (Perkins  ), nevertheless, men and women are expected to co-operate with God’s grace in producing good works: the new society which Perkins is writing for needs discipline and self-control, if it is to prosper and enjoy internal order.

The modern period Calvinist views of predestination offer one theological view of history, controlled by an overriding divine plan. Baur and Hilgenfeld develop a view of world history which is very different, but deeply theological nonetheless. For them the emergence of Christian God-consciousness in Christian faith at the turn of the era is a significant development in the history of the world, in the unfolding of the world spirit in history. Religion not only reflects developments in politics and economics, which reached a significant new stage with the emergence of the Roman Principate; religion is also a major force in enabling society to respond to such opportunities and developments. For Baur, a new universal religious consciousness emerges in Christian faith which transcends the ethnic particularism of religions such as Judaism. While this universal religious self-consciousness finds vivid expression in the Sermon on the Mount, it is only in the conflict between Pauline and Jewish-Christian Christianity that the awareness of its distinctiveness fully dawns. ‘In a word, it is Paulinism that first brought about the break in Christian consciousness with Judaism’ (Baur : ). Jewish particularism is distinguished from Christian universalism; the greater the upheaval in Paul’s religious consciousness, the sharper the contrast between the two would have been. In Gal :, ‘we see right into the inner process of his religious consciousness’ (Baur : ). Whereas Calvin and Perkins, appealing to the three phrases in v. , had distinguished different phases in Paul’s conversion and call, Baur focuses his attention primarily on Paul’s claim to have received a revelation: ‘the revelation in which God revealed his Son in him, and the call which he then received to preach the Gospel among the Gentiles, were to his mind one and the same spiritual act’ (Baur : –). For Paul, the ‘absoluteness of the Christian principle consists, however, simply



Galatians :–

in this: that it is essentially identical with the person of Christ. . . . it was in that person that the Christian principle came to his consciousness as that which it essentially is’ (Baur : ). For Paul, Baur argues, it was the revelation of Jesus Christ as the Son of God, not simply as the Jewish Messiah, which led to this profound change in his self-consciousness. Whereas previously he had persecuted the church because its proclamation of the crucified Jesus as the Messiah had offended his – Jewish – understanding of Messiahship, now [e]verything that was national and Jewish in the Messianic idea (and this had been modified in the consciousness of the other apostles only by their changing the form of it and referring it to the second coming of Jesus) was at once removed from the consciousness of our apostle by the one fact of the death of Jesus.

Christ now comes to ‘be recognised as (that which he was to the apostle) the absolute principle of the spiritual life’. In this principle ‘the apostle is conscious of the essential difference of the spirit from the flesh, of freedom from everything by which man is outwardly affected, of the reconciliation of man with God, and of man’s union with God’ (Baur : –). And the important point for Baur is that Paul’s experience of rejecting Jesus as the Jewish Messiah and his subsequent recognition of him as Son of God means that he has a far clearer understanding of this new principle. For the other apostles, Jesus’s failure so far to live up to Jewish ideals of the Messiah could be made good, in the light of their belief in the resurrection, by his second coming in glory. For Paul, he was now revealed as the Son of God far transcending Jewish particularistic and nationalistic ideas of a Messiah. Baur’s disciple, Hilgenfeld, displays a similar zeal for uncovering Paul’s religious self-consciousness in his commentary on Galatians. I could not part company with this letter of the apostle before I had succeeded in grasping in all its detail the clarity and firmness of his spirit and character, undismayed as it was by any storm, the freshness and liveliness of his spiritual vision, which ran through everything, before I had enlivened the general conception of his work with the breath of his deeply powerful individuality which inspired everything that he did. (Hilgenfeld : IV)

This emphasis on Paul’s religious personality, his self-consciousness, finds interesting expression in Lightfoot’s meditiation ‘On Paul’s sojourn in Arabia’ (Lightfoot : –). Lightfoot first dismisses two identifications of ‘Arabia’, one offered by the Arabic version of the Polyglotts, made from the Greek, which translates as El Belka, a region to the north-east of the Dead Sea, the other by Ewald, which takes it so widely as to include even Damascus. Lightfoot prefers to take it as referring to the Sinai peninsular, the ‘scene of the giving of the law’.

Galatians :–



‘Here, surrounded by the children of the desert, the descendants of Hagar the bondwoman, he read the true meaning and power of the law. In the rugged and barren region whence it issued, he saw a fit type of that bleak desolation, which it created and was intended to create in the soul of man.’ Here ‘he was strengthened and sanctified for his great work, was taught the breadth as well as the depth of God’s wisdom, and transformed from the champion of a bigoted and narrow tradition into the large-hearted Apostle of the Gentiles’ (Lightfoot  ). It was a visit, not, as the Fathers taught (see the excellent note, Lightfoot : , n. ), to take up urgently the task of preaching the gospel to the Gentiles. ‘He retired for a while, we may suppose, that Separate from the world, his heart Might deeply take and strongly keep The print of Heaven (Keble, Christian Year, 13th Sunday After Trinity, said of Elijah).

It is wonderful to observe how the scholar-bishop moves in the course of a few pages from the cautious philologist and historian to the full-blooded romantic. Renan could not have done better! But it is, equally, a deeply Lutheran reading. Paul’s consciousness is seen above all as the awareness that his conversion was the work of God’s grace ‘as distinct from his own efforts’. The accumulation of phrases and words in v.  are not to be read as indicating different stages or causes in his conversion, but rather they ‘all tell upon the one point on which he is insisting’ (Lightfoot : –). Dunn gathers up a number of strands of earlier Protestant readings of this passage. The language of ‘pleasing God’ in the Psalms ‘evokes overtones’ of ‘predestination teaching’, reinforced by further echoes of Jer : in Paul’s reference to his mother’s womb. Dunn further suspects a play on the word ‘Pharisees’, meaning separated ones, and Paul’s reference to being separated by God: ‘his attempt at “separatism”within Judaism had been superseded by God’s separating him for the gospel.’ God had, as it were, overruled Paul. Again, Paul ‘always speaks of his entry into Christianity as a call or commissioning’, not as conversion, ‘since he saw it not as a conversion from one religion to another, but as a recall to a proper understanding of the grace-character of Israel’s calling’ (Dunn : ). In this he draws both on Sanders’s emphasis on ‘covenantal nomism’ and also on Stendahl’s attack on Lutheran introspective readings of Paul (Stendahl : –, –), though not without a rather more Lutheran reference to ‘God’s unconditional generosity from start to finish’(my italics). Sanders had argued that staying in the covenant depended on obedience to the Law. Paul’s call is to be apostle to the Gentiles: this certainly marks a change in Paul’s understanding, away from nationalistic forms of Judaism to a more open



Galatians :–

attitude to those whom he had previously thought of as outsiders. Now the Gentiles ‘had moved to the centre of God’s purpose. So that all the previous effort to maintain the “assembly of God” as something distinct and separated from the Gentiles by definition had now to be abandoned’ (Dunn : ). And this in turn is to be related to a change in the understanding of the Christ, (probably) in the ‘recognition that God had acknowledged as indeed his Son the very one whom the law had consigned, like the Gentiles, to the status of an outsider’ (Dunn : ). Read against Baur and Sanders, Dunn’s account raises nice questions as to how far such a religion, based throughout on unconditional grace, rejecting the sharp boundaries between Jew and Gentile and centred on a Christ who is rejected by the Law, can be seen as consistent with Judaism conceived as a form of covenantal nomism. Other kinds of historical questions arise. The greater the weight that is put on the account which Paul offers of his conversion in Galatians, the more questions are raised about the coherence of his account here with that in Acts. For Baur, the contradictions which are to be found in the three accounts of Paul’s conversion in Acts (, , ) have their root in the author’s attempts to invest Paul’s experience with an external character, to portray it as an experience based on an outward and material manifestation of Jesus. Baur notes that Paul was indeed convinced that Jesus, after his appearance to the apostles and other believers, ‘at last had visibly manifested himself to him’ ( Cor :; :). But Galatians offers no explanation of the manner in which this manifestation had taken place. And while the comparison with the appearances to the other apostles in  Cor : would suggest ‘an outward objective occurrence’, the expression Paul uses in Gal :–, that it ‘pleased God to reveal himself in me’ points to ‘the subjective element of the occurrence in such a way as to prevent our laying too much stress on the outward appearance’. Acts certainly seems to suggest a ‘material appearance’, but the contradictions in the various accounts over who saw and heard what raise significant doubts on this matter (Baur : –). For Baur, Acts’ introduction of the account of the blinding light and the physical apparition to Paul (and in some versions to his companions) is evidence of the point ‘at which the mythic tradition laid its hand upon the celebrated event of the conversion of the Apostle Paul. It must be borne in mind . . . that the essence of a myth consists in the outward objective expression of what was formerly subjective and contained in the region of thought.’ Once Paul was known to have seen the ascended, glorified Lord, ‘tradition could not rest contented with conceiving the event to have transpired only inwardly, in the higher self-consciousness of the Apostle.’ But there was still a limit to what the tradition could do: it has its ‘fixed boundaries which it does not arbitrarily overstep. The truth of the original fact was preserved in the form with which tradition invested the story, where it was still held that the appearance of Jesus had not been visible to any

Galatians :–



one but the Apostle himself ’ (Baur : –). Thus for Baur the stories in Acts are evidence both of an event in Paul’s ‘higher self-consciousness’ and of the tendency of mythological traditions to objectivize spiritual truths in stories of objective manifestations of the divine. It is interesting to compare this discussion with Aquinas’s, where he distinguishes Paul’s exterior vocation (Acts :) and his interior vocation ‘in which [God] calls through a certain interior instinct, whereby God by grace touches the heart to be turned to Him’ (Aquinas : : : ). Needless to say, such disputes about the relationships between the references to Paul’s conversion in his own letters and the diverse accounts in Acts can be pursued for many reasons. For the Fathers like Jerome (PL .–), the important task is to show the underlying harmony of the accounts. The Reformers are largely dismissive at this point of claims of inconsistency: Calvin notes of v.  that ‘Luke has omitted these three years, just as elsewhere he does not mention everything. Hence the slander of those who look for inconsistency here is weak’ (Calvin : –). Upholding the self-consistency of the various canonical accounts is of major concern for Calvin. Dunn plays down the element of personal transformation implied by ‘revealed in me’ in favour of a transformation of ‘purpose and commitment’. This ties in with his emphasis on Paul’s vision of the risen Christ on the Damascus road, with the overtones of the vision of Isa :– of the Jews as the light to the nations (Acts :). Dunn comments: ‘The “revelation of Jesus Christ” meant that with Christ’s resurrection the new age of eschatological hope had dawned, which in turn meant that the climactic phase of God’s purpose for the Gentiles (as well as for Israel) had also begun’ (Dunn : , ).

Galatians :–

Paul Argues for His Independence as an Apostle (II) The Conference at Jerusalem

Historical Considerations This section continues Paul’s defence of his gospel against charges that it is contrary to the teaching of the apostles by recounting a further meeting between Paul, accompanied this time by Barnabas and Titus, and some of the apostles at Jerusalem. On this occasion, Paul relates, ‘false brothers’ attempted to interfere in the discussion and to force Titus, a Greek (not a Jew), to be circumcised. The memory of these difficult encounters causes Paul to lose control of his syntax (in vv. – and again in vv. –), but his claim is clear; the authorities in Jerusalem did not make any alterations or additions to his teaching/gospel. There are some difficult questions of historical reconstruction relating to this passage. In the first place, the relation of Paul’s account to the various accounts in Acts of his journeys to Jerusalem is difficult to clarify. Is the visit described Galatians Through the Centuries, First Edition. John Riches. © 2013 John Riches. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Galatians :–



here that of Acts  or , or indeed a much later visit? If there had, at the time of the writing of the letter, been a public agreement between Paul and the Jerusalem church about the nature of the gospel to the Gentiles, such as is reported in Acts , would not Paul have been able to silence his opponents by simply referring to it? Secondly, there is dispute and textual disagreement (v. ) over the question of Titus’s fate. Was he circumcised? Thirdly, there are questions about Paul’s relations with the Jerusalem authorities, and in particular about the nature of the agreement which was reached. How far were the consequences of a simple agreement, to let Paul continue with his Law-free gospel to the Gentiles, while Peter would continue with his Jewish-Christian preaching to the Jews, really thought through? What would be the implications of such a policy in a mixed congregation? This kind of endorsement (at least, as he sees it) of Paul’s Law-free gospel clearly also raises wider questions about the nature and purpose of the Law, which will be taken up later in the letter. The passage also raises questions about unity and diversity of thought and practice in the early church. How far, and along what lines, was the early church divided? The answers given to that question will raise further questions about the nature of apostolic authority, but these we shall consider more fully in the next section.



The Relationship of Acts and Galatians

In Acts we have one of the earliest examples of the reception of Paul, though one which, unlike the deutero-Pauline epistles, is not modelled on his letters but which rather offers a narrative account of his travels and speeches. Acts records five or six visits by Paul to Jerusalem after his conversion: one with Barnabas, after his escape from Damascus immediately after his conversion (:–); one, after his year’s stay in Antioch, with Barnabas to bring famine relief to the church (:–); possibly a further visit with Barnabas and John Mark ‘after completing their mission’ (:; this depends on reading ‘returned to’ instead of ‘returned from’ Jerusalem); one as part of a delegation, including Barnabas, from Antioch to address the issue of circumcision raised by ‘certain individuals from Jerusalem’ (a visit culminating in the apostolic decrees permitting, among other things, Gentile converts to remain uncircumcised, :–); a brief visit in :; and a final visit during which Paul is attacked by the Jews, arrested by the Romans, and eventually despatched under guard to Rome (chs –). In all this Paul appears as the prime exponent of the Gentile mission but also as one who was willing to compromise and seek accommodation with Jewish Christians (witness his circumcision of Timothy, :, and his undergoing of the rite of purification, :).



Galatians :–

Church commentators, until the rise of historical criticism (more specifically till F.C. Baur) assume that Paul’s account must broadly tally with that of Acts, though neither need be complete. The dominant view among scholars today is that Paul here is describing the same visit as Luke describes in Acts . Many early commentators pass over the question altogether (Chrysostom, Augustine). Aquinas (: –; : –) discusses the date ‘after fourteen years’, relating it to traditions about Peter’s stays in Antioch and Rome, and comes to the conclusion that it must be understood to mean that the visit took place ‘in the fourteenth year of Paul’s conversion’. The apostles’ acceptance of the uncircumcised Titus into their fellowship is thus preparatory for the subsequent decision about non-observance of the Law in Acts : (Aquinas : –; : –). Both Luther and Calvin, however, question the connection with Acts . Luther (: ; LW omits) disputes the identification on the grounds that the events of Acts  happened ‘immediately after the beginning of the gospel,’ and therefore places the events of Galatians  much later. He takes the  years to date from after Paul’s initial preaching in Damascus and Arabia. Calvin identifies the visit with that at the end of Acts , when Paul and Barnabas brought the collection from the churches in Greece and Asia Minor. To save Peter’s blushes, he argues that Paul had rebuked Peter in Antioch before this visit to Jerusalem, for Peter would not have behaved as he did in Antioch if the dispute had already been settled. Above all, Calvin thinks that the letter itself must have been written before the visit in Acts , for otherwise Paul would certainly have referred to it in his letter. While his opponents were falsely claiming the support of the apostles and doing their utmost to harass Paul, how careless he would have been to pass over the decree circulated among them all which undermined their position. Undoubtedly one word would have shut their mouth: ‘You bring the apostles against me, but who does not know their decision? Therefore I have convicted you of shameless lying. In their name you lay on the Gentiles the necessity of observing the law; but now their verdict exists which sets men’s consciences free’. (: –)

He accordingly reckons the  years from the date of Paul’s conversion, and not from the first visit. The situation changes significantly after Baur’s attacks on the historicity of Acts (: –, citing Schneckenburger ), where he argues that ‘the facts with which it deals do not appear to be narrated simply and directly, but to be modified by certain subjective aims which the writer had in view’ (Baur : ). These were principally related to the author’s desire to ‘represent the difference between Peter and Paul as unessential and trifling’ (Baur : ). This

Galatians :–



meant that Baur felt himself under no obligation to demonstrate the consistency between the accounts in Acts and Galatians and energetically points up the differences between Paul’s account of his visit in Galatians  and the account in Acts . This leads him to conclude that Acts’ portrayal of the consultation as a public affair, as opposed to Paul’s emphasis on its essentially private nature, was a later construction. But as the Apostle himself could not have been silent on so important an event if the public assembly had really taken place as the Acts of the Apostles relates, it follows from his silence that the Acts of the Apostles first gave a prominence to the affair which, according to the Apostle’s own report, it could never have possessed. It is only in the narrative of the Acts of the Apostles, and in the interest to which it is devoted, that these transactions take the character of a Synod, which reminds us of the formalities of later times. (Baur : )

And so he concludes: Gal. ii. cannot be interpreted in the light of Acts XV.; and as for the apologetic aim of the account, we cannot understand the great earnestness with which the Apostle here defends the cause of his Gospel, till we suppose that he had not to do merely with the pareisaktoi pseudadelphoi [false apostles who had been smuggled in] but with the Apostles themselves. (Baur : )

Lightfoot sought to defend the historicity of Acts’ account by arguing for the essential consistency of the two accounts: if Acts suggests that Paul was part of a delegation sent by the church of Antioch, while Paul says it was because of a revelation that he went up with Barnabas, this was because Paul’s ‘revelation either prompted or confirmed the decision of the church’ (Lightfoot : ). ‘The historian [i.e. Luke] naturally records the external impulse, which led to the mission: the Apostle himself states his inward motive’ (Lightfoot : ). Paul’s account of a private meeting with those of repute ‘is inserted not to exclude a public conference but to emphasize his private consultations’ which ‘probably preceded the general congress, which occupies the prominent place in St. Luke’s narrative’ (: ). Subsequent discussions of the historical questions raised by Paul’s account of this visit to Jerusalem have failed to produce a scholarly consensus. Dunn (: ) provides a useful summary of the issues. Those who identify the visit in Galatians  with that of Acts  do so on the basis of a belief in the reliability of Acts, but then face the question why, if the issue of circumcision had been resolved at this stage, a further full discussion was required such as is related in Acts . The majority, who prefer to identify the visit of Galatians  with that of Acts , have to recognize the ‘degree to which this view puts the historicity of Acts in question’. They also need to take Calvin’s



Galatians :–

question seriously, as to why Paul did not then refer to this widely known decree. Once scholars abandon the assumption that the two accounts in Galatians and Acts are consistent with one another, however, then the way is open to recognise the tendentiousness not only of Acts’ but also of Paul’s account. Luke may be seeking to tone down the differences within the early church and to portray Paul as a conciliatory figure: Paul, by contrast, is insisting on seeing the encounter as a further revelatory act through which the gospel entrusted to him is confirmed as central to the eschatological events whereby ‘God is now creating history . . . One can even say that the gospel has a history, because God repeats his apocalyptic presence’ (Martyn b: ).



Was Titus Circumcised?

It is likely that Paul took Titus with him in order to make a point: here was an uncircumcised Gentile convert; would the Jerusalem leadership insist on circumcision before accepting him into their fellowship? (Interestingly, though it is a fact rarely commented on, Titus is not included in those who shared the symbolic handshake at the end of the meeting, v. .) Paul says that Titus was not compelled to be circumcised – which presumably does not exclude his having been cajoled or persuaded into it, for the sake of the cause. Paul also says, according to the preferred text, that he did not for a moment submit to the demands of the false brothers (v. ), but some manuscripts omit the ‘[to whom] not’. The text, that is to say, and the textual evidence are ambiguous. Lightfoot discusses the matter at length (Lightfoot : –) and argues that the omission is to be attributed principally to a strand of textual traditions traceable back through the Old Latin version ‘to some Western MS or MSS alone’. The majority of the Greek MSS include the negative (with the exception of the Greek version of the Western D). It was, moreover, read by many of the Fathers and, significantly, Marcion. Tertullian excludes it, it would appear, because it was found in Marcion and not in his own Latin text. He argues, rather weakly, that Paul yields to the false brothers until such time as he can have the verdict of the apostles on his own ministry (Marc. v. ; ANF .). Above all he wants to show that Paul can easily accommodate the practices of Jewish Christians: he does not, that is, endorse Marcion’s view that Jesus reveals a new God, which would have led him to reject the Law out of hand. Jerome (PL .–), while noting that the negative is omitted in the Latin versions, argues that the account of the events at Jerusalem would rather require the negative. Lightfoot comments drily:

Galatians :–



It is not uninteresting to observe how little influence this important various reading has had on the interpretation of the passage. The omission or insertion of oὐδέ [not] might have been expected to decide for or against the circumcision of Titus. This however is not the case. The Latin Fathers [Victorinus and the Ambrosian Hilary] who left out the negative, generally maintained that he was not circumcised. Several modern critics, who retain it, hold that he was. (Lightfoot : )

The majority view remains that he was not circumcised, taking the emphasis in the sentence to lie on ‘not’ rather than on ‘compelled’ (Longenecker ). Dunn, who adopts this view, understands Paul to emphasize the fact that the Jerusalem apostles ‘did not exert the compulsion’, thereby ‘recognising the force of the reasons Paul gave for refusing’ (Dunn : ).



The Nature of the Dispute

The central issue underlying the passage is, however, the question of the nature of the dispute and subsequent agreement reached between Paul and ‘those who were of repute/were reputed to be something’ (vv. , , ). How serious a dispute was this? Was it, as Chrysostom believes, merely an apparent dispute, resulting from a stratagem (oikonomia, NPNF .; for fuller discussion of this view which first occurs in Origen in relation to the dispute at Antioch, see next section) on the part of both the apostles and Paul, whereby they were for a time willing to condone the observance of the Law by Jewish Christians, so as not to frighten them away, but with the long-term purpose of discarding the Law altogether? (‘the Apostles made this concession, not as vindicating the law, but as condescending (katabainein) to the infirmities of Judaism’; NPNF .)? This explains conveniently why Paul met with the apostles in private, for he could not explain the stratagem publicly without ruining the effect. It also requires Chrysostom to tone down the irony in Paul’s repeated use of the verb dokeō, ‘to seem, to be of repute’, for on such a view Paul and the apostles are both playing the same game. The expression, says Chrysostom, ‘does not impugn the reality of the fact, but adopts the estimate of others, and implies that these great and distinguished men, whose fame was universal, bore witness that his preaching was ratified by Christ’ (NPNF .). Aquinas follows Chrysostom, whom he cites, in asserting that the apostles believed the Law to have been superseded. Circumcision was an instrument of the old covenant and promise; once that promise was fulfilled in Christ’s passion, then the instrument ceased to be valid. Circumcision was in itself a matter of indifference, as Paul’s agreement to Timothy’s circumcision shows; but once it is claimed to be necessary, then it must be rejected, not least since, in Aquinas’s view, ‘it was not lawful to raise



Galatians :–

this question again or to make difficulties about a matter now settled’ (: ; : ). For Luther, however, the dispute here goes to the heart of Paul’s gospel. He rejects the notion that the apostles or Paul had ‘dissembled with an official falsehood’; what was at stake here was too serious for that. At issue was the chief article of Christian doctrine, ‘whether the law be necessary to justification or no?’ (Luther : ; LW :). Again, there is some blurring of the lines between the events in Jerusalem and the subsequent dispute at Antioch. Meanwhile, there was a willingness on both sides to allow Jews to continue with the observance of the Law, provided that it was not seen as necessary to justification. God bore with the weakness of the Jews, ‘who, though they had received the faith of Christ, thought it necessary notwithstanding to observe the law’. Such forbearance is, however, only temporary, ‘until the doctrine of the Gospel might be plainly discerned from the law’ (Luther : ; LW .). For what brings life is the doctrine of justification by faith, and this is confirmed by the gift of the Holy Spirit to the Gentiles, ‘without the law and circumcision’ (Luther : ; LW .). Luther recognizes the force of custom and law, which makes it difficult for those who make a radical break with their past to abandon their roots, and compares the Jews who believed favourably with his own opponents: ‘We see at this day, how obstinate the Papists be in defending their traditions and doctrines of devils; wherefore, it was much less to be marvelled that the Jews did so vehemently and zealously strive for the maintenance of their law, which they had received from God’ (Luther : –; LW .). Calvin takes a very similar view: Paul would not allow Titus to be circumcised because it would have been immediately taken by the false brothers to indicate that Paul had abandoned his doctrine of the liberty of faith. Nevertheless, because circumcision is indifferent, its practice can on occasion be permitted. If it is in the interests of the weak, then charity should prevail; but equally ‘we must stoutly resist the malicious, who deliberately plot against our liberty. The duties of love should not harm faith. Therefore, in matters indifferent, love will be our best guide, so long as faith receives our first attention’ (Calvin : –). Clearly, both Calvin and Luther are at pains to point out that though circumcision itself may be a matter of indifference, this admission should not be taken in any way to suggest that there can be any adulteration of their fundamental belief that justification is through faith alone. Nor does either of them consider questions of the consistency between Paul’s acceptance of circumcision for Timothy and his insistence elsewhere that to observe any part of the law is to bind oneself to observe the whole. Among modern commentators, Dunn clearly follows the reformers here: ‘clear scriptural teaching and historic practice had been set aside – presumably on the grounds that Paul’s interpretation of agreed confessional formulae could claim not only heav-

Galatians :–



enly authority (i.–), but also the validation of successful missionary work (ii.–; iii.–)’ (: –). On the other hand, there are those for whom any compromise with the observance of the Law must be seen as an adulteration, or indeed as a denial, of the true faith. For Marcion, the Law was the edict of a God other than the unknown God of Jesus. Apart from Paul, the apostles were in error because they still acknowledged the God of the Law, which they followed. In consequence, Marcion omits from the passage the phrase ‘the gospel of the circumcision,’ which is constructed in parallel to Paul’s ‘gospel of uncircumcision’, as indeed he appears to have omitted most of the introduction to the meeting in Jerusalem in vv. –a, and any phrase that might bring Paul into too close an association with the apostles. In vv. b–, he omits ‘of fellowship’ from the phrase ‘right hand of fellowship’; he also omits Barnabas, while retaining the plural ‘we should remember the poor’ and omitting ‘which very thing I was eager to do’. The effect of these changes is to remove any suggestion either of fellowship or of subordination. What in the received text is an account of conditions imposed on Paul and Barnabas now becomes one of a requirement equally on Paul and the ‘pillars’ (who are reordered, with Cephas taking precedence over James; Harnack : , *). Rather differently, Baur sees here a dramatic unfolding of the religious selfconsciousness, which was crucial to the emergence of a new, universal Christian consciousness. ‘Here first in the history [sc. of Christianity] a decided difference presents itself between Jewish and Gentile Christianity; what was looked upon in Antioch as a servitude in direct opposition to the idea of Christian freedom, was considered in Jerusalem as true and genuine Christianity’ (Baur : , n. ). All this will be developed more fully in the subsequent dispute at Antioch. For the moment, so Baur, Paul had presented clear arguments for his position in Jerusalem, which were in essence that (:) ‘he could not have accomplished so great a success as an Apostle among the Gentiles, if God, to whose operation this success must be referred, had not willed to establish by it the fact that there was in reality an euangelion tēs akrobustias [lit. gospel of the uncircumcision]’ (Baur : ). The ‘Jewish Apostles’ recognized this; they could not see in Paul’s labours ‘the operation of an ungodly, unchristian principle’ (Baur : ). Nevertheless, there was as yet no real reconciliation. They had conceded Paul’s arguments, but not drawn the conclusions which they should have: that they should therefore also work for the gospel of the uncircumcision. ‘They did not do this; and as we must hold them to have been sincere in the concession made to the Apostle Paul, we must conclude that they were in an unsettled state regarding these views and opinions, which necessarily involved them in contradictions and inconsequences . . . [N]othing else remained than to assume as indifferent a position as possible towards Pauline Christianity’ (Baur : ), a position which would clearly lead to further



Galatians :–

disputes. If Baur is often portrayed as simply imposing an alien – Hegelian – schema on the history of the early church, a closer reading of this section of his Paul should show how carefully he works with his texts and how sharply he brings the different views of the protagonists in these early disputes into focus.

Galatians :–

Justification by Faith: The New Life in Christ

Overview This passage concludes Paul’s narrative defence of his apostolate, which began at :. In it he relates the story of a confrontation between himself and Peter and Barnabas which took place at Antioch, presumably after the agreement at Jerusalem which Paul has just described. This confirms the view that the agreement recorded in vv. – was less than conclusive. Here the issue is not circumcision as such, but table-fellowship and, more generally, the observance of the Law. Peter, who, along with Paul and Barnabas, had been living a Gentile life-style while among the Gentile Christians in Antioch, yields to pressure from certain persons sent from Jerusalem by James, and breaks off this fellowship. Furthermore, it seems that he now required the Gentile converts to live like Jews (v. ), presumably to observe Jewish food laws and other practices, possibly even to be Galatians Through the Centuries, First Edition. John Riches. © 2013 John Riches. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.



Galatians :–

circumcised. Paul castigates such behaviour as hypocrisy (going back on the agreement just made, acting quite inconsistently by suddenly requiring of Gentiles what he had just permitted himself to ignore, despite his own Jewishness), emphatically asserts his belief that justification comes only through faith in Christ and not through observation of the Law, and then goes on to speak of the believer’s relationship to the Law and to Christ in terms which will play a central role in Christian mysticism. This passage then raises two major issues: () the relation of Peter and Paul, and the implications of this dispute for subsequent Christian understanding of church authority; () the nature of Paul’s doctrine of justification and, closely related to this, the meaning of the language of participation in Christ, of Christ’s indwelling in the believer, at the end of the chapter, which in turn has a direct bearing on the understanding of justification. Part of the interest of this section will be to see the different weightings which the various commentators give to the two themes in this passage: justification by faith and participation in Christ. The latter theme and, in particular, v. , are given particular attention in the traditions of mystical theology.



Conflict at Antioch

Patristic and medieval period Interpreters of the passage give very different evaluations of the behaviour of the participants in the dispute. (For an excellent discussion of the history of reception of this topic, see Kieffer : –, whom I principally follow here.) The Pseudo-Clementine Homilies depict the conflict between Paul and Peter indirectly through the description of an encounter between Simon Magus and Peter. In what appears to be a direct reference to Gal :: ‘because he stood condemned’, Peter says: ‘But if you say that I am condemned, you bring an accusation against God, who revealed the Christ to me’ (Ps. Clem. Hom; . ANF .). On the other hand, the Gnostics and Marcion uphold Paul’s criticism and broaden it to devalue or to discredit the apostles and their teaching and Gospels. The followers of Simon Magus ‘imagined that they have themselves discovered more than the apostles, by finding out another god; and maintained that the apostles preached the Gospel still somewhat under the influence of Jewish opinions, but they themselves are purer [in doctrine], and more intelligent, than the apostles’ (AH ..; ANF .). In The Gospel of Philip the ‘apostles and apostolic persons’ are referred to as Hebrews, who are contrasted with the Christians: ‘When we were Hebrews we were orphans with

Galatians :–



(only) our mother, but when we became Christians we got father and mother’ (Gosp. Phil., .; .; in Layton : , ). Marcion (Marc. .; ANF .), as we have seen earlier, believes that all the Gospels, with the exception of his own version of Luke, were ‘perverting the gospel of Christ’. Against such voices, Fathers like Origen and, following him, Jerome and Chrysostom developed a highly strained apologetic which (as we have already seen with Chrysostom) was based principally on the belief that the apostles were all to some greater or lesser extent engaged in a stratagem which was designed to encourage Jewish Christians: in short, they would, where possible, allow Jewish Christians to continue to observe the Law, even though they knew that it was a matter of indifference. So, like Paul, they tried to be all things to all men, so that they might gain them all. At worst, the apostles’ behaviour showed inconsistency in, like Paul, ‘practising somewhat different from what he taught’ and did not entail a deliberate falsification of the gospel (Marc. .; .; ANF ., ). In a more radical attempt to exonerate the apostle Peter, Clement of Alexandria identifies Cephas in Galatians  with one of the  in Lk : (Eusebius, h.e. .; NPNF ., see n. ). Origen then, according to Jerome, developed a more elaborate defence: Paul ‘resisted Peter and the others publicly, so that the pretence of observing the Law which offended the Gentile converts, might be corrected by the pretence of a reproach and that the two peoples might be saved: those who praised circumcision by following Peter and those who refused circumcision by preaching the liberty which Paul taught’ (Jerome, PL .). As Chrysostom has it: ‘Had Peter disputed Paul’s sentence, he might justly have been blamed as upsetting the plan, but now that the one reproves and the other keeps silence, the Jewish party are filled with serious alarm; and this is why he used Peter so severely’ (NPNF .). Such views are challenged by Marius Victorinus, who condemns Peter’s ‘major sin’ (Victorinus : ; : ) because he not only acted out of fear but ‘because your pretence is deceiving many’ (Victorinus : ; : ). Somewhat later, Augustine engages in a vigorous correspondence with Jerome, objecting to his version of the dispute in Antioch on the ground that it made Paul into a liar. Paul is calling Peter back from ‘a piece of pernicious deceit’. Jerome’s view that Paul approved Peter’s action ‘while condemning him by word and pen with the ostensible object of soothing the mind of those who were raging against him’ would, by turning Paul into a liar, wholly undermine the authority of Scripture. Once that were allowed, then any passage which presents difficulties, either ethical or doctrinal, would be ‘classified as the deliberate act of an author who was lying’ (Augustine, ep. , : –). This dispute becomes a classic text which is reported in the Glossa and commented on by Aquinas, who in the main follows Augustine. Scripture cannot be allowed to contain lies, and therefore it is permissible to say that Peter was worthy of reproof. Nevertheless,



Galatians :–

he sees Peter’s sin as only a venial sin, due to his lack of discernment in leaning too much to the party of the Judaizers in order to prevent them from being offended (Aquinas : ; : ).

Luther Luther, by contrast, insists throughout the different versions of his commentary on Galatians that Peter’s sin was a mortal sin. ‘This I know that those who were constrained by Peter’s hypocrisy to judaise, would have been lost, if Paul had not led them onto the right way, They had begun in effect to seek their justification not in the faith of Christ but in the works of the law’ (WA /). Clearly, his own experience of confronting the might of Rome is reflected here. It is not the dignity of the apostle which is of importance but his function of preaching the gospel (WA ., on Gal :): where he fails, he is to be reprimanded lest he lead the whole church into error: What I wanted to say was this: when Peter put a stumbling block in the way of the church on matters of faith, he would have deserved to have been removed from his office (prelatura), if he had not been corrected by Paul; for an heretical pastor or one who dissembles to the point of endangering the faith, commits a grave sin. For indeed, by this dissimulation of Peter, there was a risk that the faith of Christ would be entirely destroyed, as Paul says. (WA /, Luther’s Disputation with Eck at Leipzig in )

This was more than a mortal sin which harms the private individual; it was a heresy which would have harmed the whole community. For what is at stake here is the truth of the gospel, which is to say, the doctrine of justification by faith and not by works. Luther takes up this theme in his / commentary, where he weighs in on the side of Augustine against Jerome. Jerome considered only the dignity of Peter, and therefore made of Paul’s reproach merely an apparent reproach. Thus he turns Paul into a dissembler and attributes the truth to Peter. The text, on the other hand, says clearly that Peter was reprehensible and ‘had strayed from the truth’ (Luther : ; LW .).

Calvin Very similar arguments are to be found in Calvin, who sees Paul’s speech as an official reproof of Peter ‘by the right of the apostolic office (persona) that he (Paul) bore’, delivered before the matter had been officially settled at Jerusalem . He sees Paul’s real, not simulated, correction of Peter as clearly undermining the claims of the papacy: ‘it is a reproof of the impudence of the Roman Antichrist

Galatians :–



Plate  Guido Reni, St Peter and St Paul. Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan/akg-images/Electa. Plates ,  and  [this page and overleaf] Three different portrayals of the relationship between Peter and Paul. Reni’s and El Greco’s both emphasize the elements of confrontation and tension between the two, and their different bases of authority, Paul’s in Scripture, Peter with the authority of the keys. Rembrandt’s painting shows two scholars (thought to be Peter and Paul) searching the scriptures together.



Galatians :–

Plate  El Greco, The Apostles, St Peter and St Paul. Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg/akg-images.

in claiming that he need not give any reasons for his actions and so exempting himself from the judgement of the universal Church’ (Calvin : ). In consequence, he rejects Jerome’s and Chrysostom’s views of the matter, attacking in particular Jerome’s argument that Paul could not have been seriously reproving Peter, for he too both lived as a Gentile and observed Jewish customs in circumcising Timothy. Calvin argues that Paul ‘accommodated himself to the Jews only so far as was consistent with the doctrine of liberty’, refusing to circumcise Titus; whereas Peter ‘judaized in such a way as to force the Gentiles into slav-

Galatians :–



Plate  Rembrandt, Two Old Men Disputing (St Peter and St Paul), 1628, oil on wood panel, 72.4 × 59.7cm.

ery and at the same time to undermine Paul’s doctrine as if the matter had been already settled’ (Calvin : ). The issue turns precisely on this question of liberty. It is the fact that the apostles coerce the Gentiles to Judaize which means that they do not walk in the truth of the Gospel. ‘The whole force of the reproof lies in this word, a fact which neither Chrysostom or Jerome has noticed. The use of ceremonies for edification was free so long as believers were not deprived of their liberty or laid under any necessity from which the Gospel releases them’ (Calvin : ).



Galatians :–

Perkins Perkins largely follows Calvin: Paul reproaches Peter, ‘not for shew and fashion, but in truth and good earnest’, and does so to ‘doe his office. The kingdom of God, and all things pertaining thereto, must have free passage without resistance’ (Perkins : ). It is necessary to resist evil which can hinder the progress of the kingdom, as Paul does here to the ‘uttermost of his power’. There is then no question but that the apostles, and by extension, the ‘pretended successors of Peter’, can err. But then, what of the apostolic writings which are to be found in Scripture? Perkins answers: ‘while they were delivering any thing to the Church, whether it were by Sermon, or writing, they were guided by the infallible assistance of the Spirit, and could not erre. Otherwise they might erre, when they were out of this worke, in mind, will, affection, or action’ (Perkins : ).

The modern period The tendency to see Peter and Paul as being opposed over deep matters of theological principle is taken up and given more radical form in the historical theology of F.C. Baur. Peter and Paul represent two opposed parties: Peter, the Jewish-Christian party upholding the observance of the particular laws of the Jewish community; Paul, the exponent of a universal Law-free Gospel which has at its heart a new religious self-consciousness where union with God is mediated through consciousness of participation in the Son. ‘[I]n the pneuma [spirit] as the principle which determines his whole consciousness and life, he is truly and actually placed in the relation to God which is adequate to the idea of God. The relation which, in the case of faith imputed for righteousness, was a merely outward one, has now by the means of the pneuma, in which God communicates his spirit to man, and in which he dwells in man as the spirit of Christ, become a truly inward one, Rom viii.’ (Baur : ). For Paul, the transcendence of national, particular forms of religion was an essential part of his gospel (Gal :), and this principle became clearer to him as he was drawn into the controversy with the Judaizers and Peter. Initially this new consciousness was present only in Paul; as a result of this controversy, it emerges with greater clarity and strength. This is the dialectic by which the world spirit comes to itself. Interestingly, the Antioch dispute reveals within Jewish Christianity both a strict and a liberal party. The stricter party ‘wished to impose on Gentile Christians also the general principle that there was no salvation apart from Judaism, which all Jewish Christians held alike, and this to its full significance and practical issues’, whereas the more liberal party, probably headed by the Jewish apostles, upheld the general principle, but, in the light of the conces-

Galatians :–



sions made to Paul at Jerusalem, ‘renounced the carrying out of their principles, which consistency might have demanded, and limited their operations to Judaism’ (Baur : –). What is quite clear to Baur is that the controversy at Antioch brought the two opposed principles of Jewish and Pauline Christianity into direct conflict: ‘How striking and abrupt is here the contrast between Paul and Peter! How open and unsparing is Paul’s censure! How severe and vehement his speech! How keenly he exposes the contradiction in which Peter found himself involved through his irresolution!’ (Baur : ). Thus it is that here a key turning point in the history of Christianity, and indeed in the development of the religious consciousness of the world occurs, as this conflict is fought out. Baur’s views, which depended on a severely critical reading of Acts, were challenged first by Albrecht Ritschl () and then in England by Lightfoot. Lightfoot relies heavily on Acts and attempts to harmonise Paul’s account with Luke’s in Acts. He assumes that the incident occurs after the agreements reached in Acts , and that therefore Peter is being inconsistent with himself rather than adopting a more strictly Jewish Christian position. While Paul may say that Peter compelled the Gentiles to Judaize, Lightfoot takes this as meaning ‘practically oblige them, though such was not his intention. The force of his example, concealing his true principles, became a species of compulsion’ (Lightfoot : ). No evidence (apart from the prior references to Acts) is given for these claims. More importantly, Lightfoot argues that the focus of the passage shifts from Paul’s confrontation with Peter to his debate with the Judaizers in Galatia: ‘Paul’s thoughts and language have drifted away from Peter at Antioch to the Judaizers in Galatia’ (Lightfoot : ). The issues of theological principle are ones raised by those debates rather than by Peter, who is not acting on principle but inconsistently. This leaves Lightfoot with the task of explaining the surprising inconsistency of Peter after his vision in Acts  and the decision at Jerusalem in Acts . Once again he falls back on a psychologizing interpretation. ‘St. Peter’s character, as it is drawn in the Gospels, explains every [?!] difficulty. It is at least no surprise, that he who at one moment declared himself ready to lay down his life for his Lord’s sake, and even drew his sword in defence of his Master, and the next betrayed Him with a thrice repeated denial, should have acted in this case, as we inferred he acted from the combined accounts of St. Luke and St. Paul’ (Lightfoot : ). It is a combination achieved, however, at the cost of significantly modifying the charges made by Paul, at least on a reading like Luther’s. Lightfoot has no more sympathy with the views of Origen, Jerome and Chrysostom than did Augustine (see the excellent excursus on patristic interpretation of the incident, Lightfoot : –), but he softens the charges against Peter by stressing his zeal and impulsiveness. More recent scholarship has suggested that Paul had to this point been much more dependent on Jerusalem and the Antioch church than he allows in his



Galatians :–

correspondence (Holmberg : –, –). Taylor has argued that the Antioch incident marks a radical break between Paul and the church which till then had been his sending church. Now he becomes an apostle of the free spirit, who can no longer rely on the authority and legitimization of the sending church (see  Corinthians on letters of recommendation) but must rely rather on his direct commission through a revelation of God (Taylor ). In this sense it might be argued that the incident marks a point at which Paul himself is brought by circumstance to clarify his own position and principles and that his presentation of his relationship with Antioch and Jerusalem in Galatians  and  retrojects this later independence into the earlier history.



Justification by Faith and not by Works of the Law

Marcion Marcion, according to Harnack, distinguished between the moral righteousness which characterizes the Law of the creator God and the religious righteousness of the God of Jesus Christ (Harnack : ). The Law was clearly to be distinguished from evil, and its moral prescriptions were to be kept. Nevertheless, those who were devoted to the Law and its God were enslaved to it, and did not respond to Jesus Christ when he descended into hell to liberate them, while the Gentiles and sinners willingly embraced his gospel of mercy (Irenaeus, AH ., .; ANF ., ; Tertullian, Marc. .; ANF .f.). Those who obey the Law of the Creator have a faith which precludes them from believing in the Gospel. Thus, for Marcion, Paul’s distinction between justification by works of the Law and justification by faith comes to stand for two wholly opposed systems of religion, based on two different Gods. Subsequent interpreters will be on their guard against drawing the contrast between the religion of the Law and the religion of the gospel so sharply that they end up ascribing contradictory motives or purposes to the one God and so effectively dividing God.

Chrysostom Chrysostom’s commentary is guided here by his attempt to decipher the rhetorical strategy of the passage, which in turn is coloured by his own view that Paul is engaged in an elaborate subterfuge, put on principally for the benefit of the Jewish Christians and, by extension, the Galatians. This in turn is doubt-

Galatians :–



less intended for the ears of those in his flock who were attracted to the worship and customs of the Jews. In this way, compared with some of the later commentators, he is much less concerned to spell out the nature of Paul’s teaching about justification by faith than to discern the arguments which Paul uses to discourage the Galatians from turning to observance of the Law. What was at issue for Paul was a conflict of two different modes of life (politeiai). ‘The phrase, “Jews by nature,” implies that we, who are not proselytes, but educated from early youth in the Law, have relinquished our habitual mode of life, and betaken ourselves to the faith which is in Christ’ (NPNF .). Paul’s argument in v. , ‘But if, while we sought to be justified in Christ, we ourselves were also found to be sinners, is Christ a minister of sin?’ is a reductio ad absurdum. For if Paul and Peter, who were living freely alongside Gentile Christians, were now to be required to observe the Law again, that would imply that their new way of life in Christ had actually led them into sin. But that is clearly an impossible claim for anyone who truly believes in Christ, and shows how those who still insist on the observance of the Law have simply failed to grasp the true nature of their new mode of existence: ‘Thou hast put on Christ, thou hast become a member of the Lord, and been enrolled in the heavenly city, and dost thou still grovel in the Law? How is it possible for thee to obtain the kingdom?’ (NPNF .). The Judaizers’ attitude is based on fear, and stems from a lack of confidence in the gospel. ‘A fear to omit the sabbath plainly shows that you fear the Law as still in force; and if the Law is needful, it is so as a whole’ (NPNF .). For Paul there can therefore be no going back to such a mode of life, which ‘God has annulled’. Paul says that he died to the Law ‘through the Law’. Does this latter phrase refer to the law of grace or the old Law? Chrysostom accepts both these senses, but emphasizes the sense in which men’s and women’s failure to obey the Law brings punishment, such that all are dead to it. Life comes through being crucified with Christ, which refers to the death which the believer has undergone in baptism; while ‘the words “nevertheless I live, yet not I” refer to our subsequent manner of life whereby our members are mortified’. To say that Christ lives in me means that ‘nothing is done by me, which Christ disapproves’. Here Paul (whom Chrysostom portrays elsewhere as the type of the perfect monk) is his model, Paul who ‘had harnassed himself to Christ’s yoke, and cast away all worldly things, and was paying universal obedience to His will’. Such perfect obedience and mortification are Chrysostom’s model and become, through his writings, the model of the Christian way or politeia for the Christian East. Such an emphasis on heroic acts of self-abnegation and will is not, however, incompatible with a sense of gratitude for the grace received in Christ. All had incurred the severest punishment and were saved only through the advent of Christ. ‘Had this not been, nothing could have averted a destruction as general as that which took place at the flood, but His advent arrested the wrath



Galatians :–

of God, and caused us to live by faith’ (NPNF .). Chrysostom paints the two modes of existence in such sharply contrasting colours that he comes very close indeed to Marcion. In this he is doubtless motivated by his own attempts to deter his congregation in Antioch from worshipping with the Jews. While he is principally concerned in this section with explaining Paul’s stratagem in his confrontation with Peter, he will need to explain how God can annul a way of life which he had formerly commanded and which is now seen as leading (inevitably?) to destruction.

Augustine Augustine’s writings are one of the main sources of the doctrine of justification by faith and the related doctrines of grace, which played such an important part in the development of the theology of the West (see McGrath ). His treatment in his commentary on Galatians contains much of his substantive teaching in a nicely condensed form. Augustine starts by defending Paul against the charge of hypocrisy (simulatio), arguing that if he behaved one way with Jews and another with Gentiles, it was always with the intention of not allowing any obstacles to stand in the way of obtaining the kingdom and that he was careful to warn believers not to place their hope of salvation in ‘unessential things (superfluis), even though he himself might honour a custom among them so as not to offend the weak’. Even so, he permits only such customs as do not offend in any way against the faith or good morals (Augustine : ). Peter, by contrast, was condemned not for following the customs in which he had been brought up, but for wishing to impose them on the Gentiles out of fear of those who ‘still thought that faith was constituted (constitutam) by their observation’ (Augustine : ). Hence Paul’s charge: why do you force the Gentiles to live like Jews? Peter shows his true greatness by accepting his junior’s, Paul’s, public charges against him with humility. The Judaizers show their pride in thinking of the ‘gospel of Christ [as] a sort of debt paid (debitum redditum) for their righteousness’. That is to say, they think that the reception of the benefits of the gospel (salvation, membership of the church of God, etc.) is a reward for their prior performance of the Law which they achieved by their own efforts. Augustine, by contrast, argues that while justification is indeed conditional on our performance of the works of the Law, this is not something that we can achieve of ourselves but only through the grace which is given to those who believe: ‘that is, a person fulfils the works of the law when his weakness is aided not by his own merits (non merito suo) but by the grace of God.’ (The language of merit was already common in the writings of the West, not least in the commentaries of Victorinus; see Cooper : –.) Had the Juda-

Galatians :–



izers recognized this, ‘they would not have demanded from the Gentiles carnal observances of the law (carnales observationes) but would have known that the Gentiles could fulfil spiritual works of the law through the grace of faith’. This is fine, but it demands in turn a virtuoso interpretation of the next verse: ‘For by works of the Law, no flesh will be justified’, which seems to rule out works of the Law having any kind of role in justification, whether aided by divine grace or not. Augustine does not let us down. He glosses as follows: ‘For by works of the law (that is, if people attribute them to their own power and not to the grace of the merciful God), no flesh (in other words, no person, or none who think in a carnal way) will be justified’ (Augustine : ). Hence it follows that ‘those who believed in Christ when they were already under the law came to the grace of faith not because they were righteous but in order to become so’ (Augustine : ). The Jewish Christians’ righteousness was not a prior achievement to which the gospel was a response; even for them, faith is the source of righteousness. The Law (at least the Law spiritually understood) on such a view is the standard of right conduct; but its fulfilment depends on having the right capacity to fulfil it, which is granted not to those who believe in their own capacity to fulfil it, but to those who trust in the grace of God given to them. But if our salvation then continues to be dependent on our fulfilling the works of the Law, albeit with the assistance of God’s grace, what does Paul mean by saying that he is dead to the Law, through the Law? On one view, the Law is like a schoolmaster whose aim is to make himself redundant. But such a view might give too little present significance to the Law, given Augustine’s insistence that justification is conditional on our fulfilling the works which it prescribes. So Augustine (following Victorinus; Plumer :  and , n. ), offers ‘[a]nother explanation . . . that through the law understood spiritually he died to the law, in order that he might not live under it carnally’, i.e. should die to ‘carnal observances of the law’ and should rather live to God. ‘He lives to God who is under God, but he lives to the law who is under the law. Now one lives under the law . . . in so far as he has not changed from the old self (a vetere homine).’ Such sinners live by their own life and therefore require the restraint of the Law. This is not the case with the righteous ( Tim :). The righteous live in the Law, rather than under it. He who is in the Law lives to God in the sense that ‘he lives righteously with a love of righteousness . . . rejoices not in his own, transitory good but in the common, permanent good’ (Augustine : ). So, in that Christ lives in Paul (and Christ is just), no one should dare impose the Law on Christ who lives in Paul. A further qualification is made: In that Paul lives in the flesh and the flesh is mortal, it cannot be said that Christ is fully identified with him; he dwells within man by faith, ‘so that afterwards he may satisfy him by sight’ (Augustine : ). This is a highly compressed piece of argumentation, outlining positions which



Galatians :–

will have a long history in the West. Augustine is attempting to enlist Paul’s support for the notion that Christians fulfil the Law by introducing a number of distinctions between the Christian and the Jewish mode of living with the Law. Those without Christ are sinners who live – carnally – under the Law and fail to fulfil its carnal regulations. Christians live to God and live the Law in the sense that they understand it spiritually, and live out of love of righteousness in which the good is conceived not simply in terms of my own, present good but of the common, enduring good. Such a life in the Law spiritually understood is possible because of the grace which God gives to those who believe. In this sense, Christ lives in us, at least by faith. If Chrysostom stresses the ascetic discipline required of the Christian believer, Augustine’s emphasis here is more on the wisdom and understanding of the believer who now no longer sees things simply in terms of his own interests and carnal desires. For both, however, there is a close connection between the believer’s imitation of Christ and his sharing in Christ’s life as Christ lives in him. Augustine’s dependence on Victorinus deserves more attention than is possible here (see esp. Cipriani ). Cooper (: –) discusses his teaching on justification and merit and agrees with Harnack () in seeing him as the principal initiator of the doctrine of justification through faith alone. Be that as it may, those who subsequently argue that the faith which justifies is a ‘faith informed by love’ (Gal :), will equally have no difficulty in appealing to Augustine. And it is important to note that this aspect of Augustine’s teaching draws its support from his consideration of the account of the believer’s relation to Christ in the latter part of Galatians .

Thomas Aquinas Aquinas is heir both to Augustine and to medieval discussions of the nature of merits and grace. In this section Paul provides a proof of his teaching from the apostles’ manner of life and example. Although the apostles were all Jews by birth, nevertheless, because they knew that men are not justified by works of the Law, they left the Law and were ‘living according to the precepts of the faith’ Aquinas : ; : , echoing Chrysostom’s discussion of this text in terms of different politeiai). It is the way of life characterized by the term ‘faith’ which justifies. Here an objection is raised which opens up the contemporary debate about works and grace. The objection simply quotes Rom :, ‘For it is not the hearers of the Law who are just in the sight of God, but rather those who do the Law are justified’, as support for the view that people are justified by works of the Law. Aquinas replies by distinguishing two senses of ‘being justified’: performing just acts and becoming just. In the first sense a man may be said to be justified when he does works of the Law, insofar as he performs

Galatians :–



just acts, either the moral commandments or the ceremonial works, ‘as their observance is a work of obedience’. This is the sense in Rom :. But though he who observes the Law may in this way perform just acts, he does not become just, because the sacraments of the Old Testament do not confer grace (citing Gal :, where egena, needy, signifies neither conferring nor containing grace in itself). By contrast, the sacraments of the new covenant do contain ‘a grace that is present’, and are therefore able to justify. If anyone was just under the old Law, it was not by works of the Law but by faith in Christ alone, so that the sacraments of the old covenant were a declaration of faith in Christ, albeit one which configured the grace of Christ as something to come. This is why Paul clearly states that no man is justified by works of the Law but only by faith in Christ, because even if formerly some of those who performed works of the Law became just, they were only such through faith in Christ (Aquinas : –; : –). This is not an easy passage: everything turns on the understanding of ‘becoming just’. Clearly, it is not the same as performing individual just actions. What is it, and why is God’s grace necessary for its achievement? In his Summa, Aquinas treats of justification in the section on grace (IaIIae q. ). ‘The justification of the unrighteous is a movement in which the human mind is moved by God from the state of sin to the state of justice’(q. , a. ). It is a movement which has its origin in God but which, he argues, also entails the co-operation of the human soul, if that is to be achieved which God intends and effects. But while the goal of justification is primarily the forgiveness of the sinner, this is not to be understood in a narrowly forensic way. [T]he article speaks of the imparting of a new quality, a transformation of human existence at its core. Speaking of grace, it stresses the infusion of a ‘virtue’ (habitus) of grace; speaking of faith, a faith ‘formed by love.’ In justification the dynamic ordering of human existence to God is restored; sin as guilt is remitted though the tinder of sin remains. But for Thomas the transposition into a state of grace means much more than the restoration of what had been lost. It means elevation, the raising of human nature towards its supernatural destination, God himself. (Froehlich : –)

This is the conversatio, the new way of a life of faith which confers righteousness, not as something imputed but as a participation in the gifts of God, God’s love poured into the human heart. Again, as with Augustine, one can sense the influence of the concluding verses of Galatians . Paul uses the metaphor of dying to the Law and living to God to describe the transition from life under the Law to that of faith. Aquinas’s discussion of this passage provides a fine example of his thoughtful reading of texts, seeking their inner coherence and logic. Aquinas first addresses the possible charge, implicit



Galatians :–

in v. , that Paul was a destroyer of the Law. One who overthrows a law through the Law itself, is a transgressor of the Law, says Aquinas, but not therefore unjust. A law is overthrown by the Law when there are precepts in the Law which are expressly limited, temporally or locally, such that it is to be observed at this time or place and not at another. Thus when Jeremiah speaks of a new covenant with the house of Israel (Jer :), he sets a limit to the old covenant. In this sense Paul can be said to destroy the Law through the Law. But in another sense, this may (with Augustine) be understood in terms of a contrast between the spiritual and carnal Law. He dies to the Law when he has been released from the Law, as a wife is released from the law of her husband (Rom :). And there is yet a third sense. We may distinguish between the (dead) law written in a document and the (living) law in the mind of the law-giver (Aquinas : ; : ). Thus Paul is released from the dead, written law and lives to God; that is to say, ‘I am loosed from it . . . that I may guide my movements (motus) according to His precepts (dicta) and be ordained to His honor.’ And he refers forward to Paul’s discussion of the Law as a schoolmaster leading people to a higher understanding of the Law, such that they can leave behind them the more external, written law. ‘Through the law leading me by the hand I have died to the written law, in order that I might live unto God, i.e., to the maker of the Law, i.e., to be instructed and directed by Him’ (Aquinas : ; : ). It is in this light that Aquinas reads Paul’s statement that he has been crucified with Christ. It has two aspects: that he has died to the Law and that he lives to God. The first statement can have two meanings. In the first sense, found in the Glossa, to die to the Law means to die to concupiscence, to the source of sin, through the cross of Christ. Then Christ renews our life in us, having destroyed the old life of sin. On the second view, someone is said to live to that on which he/she principally sets her affections. One person may set their heart on a particular private affection and in this sense lives to himself; another seeks the good of others and is then said to live to them (Aquinas : –; : ). Thus Paul says that he has died to his own affection; that is to say, by the cross of Christ his own, private affection has been removed. He no longer lives, as cherishing an affection for his own good, but rather Christ lives in him; that is, ‘I have Christ alone in my affection and Christ Himself is my life: “To me, to live is Christ; and to die is gain”’(Aquinas : ; : ). There are, that is to say, two very interestingly distinct Christian anthropologies here: one which stresses the life of ascetic discipline, by which the believer is liberated from the former way of life; the other which sets out a view of the new life of the believer, whereby the human soul is elevated and renewed through its relationship with Christ, a sense which draws its support from Paul’s statements here about living to God and about Christ living in him. What, then, does Paul mean by saying that he lives but does not live; and in

Galatians :–



what sense was he crucified with Christ? The first question elicits a brief sketch of the relationship of the human soul to its body and to God. Paul’s soul takes its particular character from the fact that it is set between God and his body. The body is enlivened and moved by Paul’s soul, his soul in turn by Christ. Now something is properly said to live in so far as it is moved by an intrinsic principle. As far as his carnal life is concerned, Paul lived to himself, and this is what he means by ‘the life I now live in the flesh’. But as far as his relation to God is concerned, Christ lives in Paul, and thus he says that in faith he lives to the Son of God, ‘through which He dwells in me and moves me’ (Aquinas : ; : ). Finally, he takes the phrase ‘I have been crucified with Christ’ to mean: ‘that the love of Christ, which He showed to me in dying on the cross for me, brings it about that I am always nailed with Him’ (configar, nailed, transfixed to; Aquinas : ; : ). Only so, does one become just, through this unifying faith in Christ. It is Christ’s death which brings justifying grace (gratia iustificans) and truth (Jn :). Thus, if there were any just persons before Christ’s passion, it was through faith in the Christ who was to come (Aquinas : ; : ). Here Aquinas detaches himself from those traditions of Christian asceticism which see the cross as a model of spiritual self-discipline, to offer an explication of the Pauline text which emphasizes the intimate union between Christ and the soul. Within an overall perspective which sees justification as part of the work of God’s grace to a sinful humanity, Aquinas sketches out an anthropology of the new humanity in Christ, wherein Christ’s relationship to the soul is construed by analogy with the soul’s relationship to the body, the one directing the other. Both are seen as intrinsic principles (principia intrinseca); but in the case of the soul and Christ, they are joined together not, as with the soul and the body, by the accident of birth for the duration of this temporal life; but rather, they are ‘nailed together’ by the love which Christ showed on the cross. It is this bond of love in faith which is the source of unity between the soul and Christ, which leads to the soul’s affection being set on the good of others (an emphasis also to be found in Augustine), which makes her deeds good and her just; not some grace which is superadded to the good works of the soul to render them pleasing to God. It is this new mode of existence, conversatio, which is justifying, which makes believers righteous, not in virtue of their (unaided) attempts to obey the Law, but in virtue of the love of God which is poured into their hearts.



Galatians :–

Luther Like Aquinas, Luther draws heavily on Augustine, but his reading is given in much sharper tones. The contrasts between life under the Law and life in Christ are drawn more starkly; there is no sense of steady progression from life under the schoolmaster to life in Christ. Doubtless his rejection of and conflict with Manichaeanism would have deterred Augustine from drawing such sharp comparisons. Luther’s sparring partners by contrast are the schoolmen whose understanding of salvation is cast in terms of doctrines of merit and the doctrine that only faith infused or informed by love brings justification, all of which had caused him much grief. These notions of merit and of faith informed by love, both of which are to be found in Augustine, were taken up and closely linked in scholastic theology (McGrath : –). Scholastic theologians distinguished two kinds of meritorious works: those which (prior to the giving of God’s grace) were deemed to be worthy of reward because it was appropriate that God should look favourably on them (meritum de congruo); and those which, in virtue of God’s grace, were fully deserving of reward (meritum de condigno), such that God might be said to be under an obligation (debitum) to give such a reward. In the first case God is not obliged to reward the person performing such acts, but does so because he is just and good; in the second case, ‘God is become a debtor’, because it is not only ‘a work of freewill, done according to the substance, but also done in grace which maketh a man acceptable unto God, that is to say, in charity’ (Luther : ; LW .). The problem with this is that, on the one hand, it lays an obligation on people to produce good works of their own free will and efforts, and at the same time decrees that such works are not in themselves properly deserving of salvation. As Luther bluntly puts it: ‘As if a mistress should not be contented that her cook had dressed her meat excellently well, but should chide her for that she did not prepare the same, being decked with precious apparel, and adorned with a crown of gold’ (Luther : ; LW .). The doctrine of faith informed by love (which draws scriptural support from Gal :) provided an explanation of the nature of those works which fully deserved to be rewarded (de condigno). These are works which proceed from an agent into whose heart God has poured his love, which then becomes an inherent quality or ‘habit’ which informs his faith and bears fruit in good works wholly pleasing to God. On such a view, so Luther, ‘man is righteous by his own formal righteousness, which is grace making him acceptable to God, that is to say, charity’ (Luther : ; LW .). In this way, Luther understands the schoolmen to teach both that human beings are capable of loving God and performing works worthy of salvation through their own natural strength, and

Galatians :–



that God will not accept such works unless they are accompanied by a supernaturally given love which informs faith and which alone makes it acceptable to God. In this context, faith informed by love is seen as a particular way of obeying God’s will. The schoolmen distinguished two modes of fulfilling the law: either according to the substance of the deed (secundum substantiam facti) or according to the mind of the one who executes the command (secundum intentionem praecipientis). This explains how a person may perform deeds which in themselves agree fully with the demands of the Law, but which are still not acceptable to God, because they have not been fulfilled in charity: ‘not that charity which thou hast by nature, but that which is above nature and heavenly, which he himself giveth . . . a quality above nature poured into us from above (habitum supernaturalem). . . . So faith is the body and the shell: charity the life, the kernel, the form and furniture. These are the monstrous dreams of the schoolmen’ (Luther : –; LW .–). Luther, that is, is not simply attacking the (Pelagian) view that men and women are justified by good works performed of their own free will. His target is a scholastic doctrine of grace, which requires both that human beings perform acts in accordance with the Law and that such acts be ‘informed’ by a supernatural disposition or habit of mind which is freely, graciously, given by God and without which such acts are unacceptable. Thus faith, on such a view, is of no effect without such supernatural, freely given charity. One can see how such doctrines could develop from Aquinas’s reading of Galatians; it is equally clear what a gulf separates the spirit of Aquinas’s reading from the doctrines which Luther so abominated. For Luther, scholastic doctrines of merit make God into a tyrant who requires both that we fulfil the law by our own strength and that we do so in a way that is pleasing to him, which only he can make possible. In consequence, men and women have double grounds for doubting whether or not they have merited salvation, whereas for Luther it is faith in Christ’s mercy and forgiveness which provides the sole and sufficient ground of their confidence. Against the scholastic portrayal of faith as deficient, as requiring to be filled and informed by God’s love if it is to justify (a view which has some roots in Augustine’s insistence on good works), Luther insists that it is faith alone which justifies. Faith is a sure trust and confidence of the heart, not something requiring to be filled with supernatural, infused charity, such that, without charity, faith is dead, of no avail. This could be taken to mean that faith for Luther is simply a matter of trust, fiducia, a grateful acceptance of God’s gift of righteousness. But Paul does not restrict himself to a simple contrast between works of the Law and faith; he concludes with his account of the new life of the believer in which it is not so much the believer who lives, but Christ who lives in the believer. It is



Galatians :–

not that some supernatural cast of mind is infused into the believer, but rather that ‘faith apprehendeth Jesus Christ, who is the form which adorneth and furnisheth (informantem) faith, as the colour adorneth and beautifieth the wall’. It is not even that faith apprehends Christ as an object: ‘he is not the object, but, as it were, in the faith itself Christ is present’ (Luther : ; LW .). This passage provides striking evidence of the sense in which Luther believes that those who are justified by faith in Christ are made righteous (iusti facti; Luther : ; LW .). Later Lutheran theologians, starting with Melanchthon, asserted that the believer’s righteousness was an alien righteousness, which belonged properly to Christ but which was merely imputed to the believer. This led them to make a formal distinction between the external, forensic work of justification, where in faith sinners accept that in Christ God has declared them righteous, even though such justification is wholly unmerited, and the ‘internal process of renewal in which the believer is regenerated through the work of the Holy Spirit’ (McGrath : –). Here Luther insists that Christ and his righteousness are present in faith, even though his presence is apprehended only darkly. ‘Faith therefore is a certain obscure knowledge, or rather darkness which seeth nothing, and yet Christ apprehended by faith sitteth in this darkness: like as God in Sinai and in the Temple sat in the midst of darkness.’ Whereas the later schoolmen said that what forms and imbues faith – that is to say, makes it alive – is charity supernaturally infused into the heart, Luther says that it is Christ who forms and imbues faith, who is the form and perfection of faith. ‘Wherefore Christ apprehended by faith, and dwelling in the heart, is the true Christian righteousness, for the which God counteth us righteous and giveth us eternal life’ (Luther : –; LW .–). This reading of Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith draws deeply on the succeeding verses in which Paul speaks of Christ living in him. Here too, Luther follows Augustine, who speaks both of the presence of Christ in the believer (a Christ on whom the Law cannot be imposed) and also of that presence being apprehended only by faith. It may well be asked how far Luther differs here from Aquinas. For Aquinas, justification is part of God’s gracious action in restoring fallen humanity. In his analysis of this action he draws heavily on Aristotelian psychology and notions of movement, and this easily leads into a strangely impersonal account of the workings of grace, where the gracious relationship between the believer and Christ is construed in terms of infusions of grace and charity into the soul. It was this understanding of Christian psychology which was taken up in the scholastic doctrines of merit to which Luther objected. Yet we have also seen that in his commentary on Galatians, Aquinas, like Luther, can speak in more personal terms of the union of love between Christ and the believer, though even here this is expressed in the impersonal, if dramatic, metaphor of being ‘nailed together’.

Galatians :–



What then of Luther’s treatment of the believer’s relation to Christ and God in vv. –? Unlike Augustine, he takes the phrase through the law in ‘I through the law died to the law’ to refer not to the Law of Moses but to the law of grace. As often, Paul speaks paradoxically; [a]s if he said: the law of Moses accuseth and condemneth me; but against that accusing and condemning law, I have another law, which is grace and liberty. This law accuseth the accusing law, and condemneth the condemning law. So death killeth death; but this killing death is life itself. But it is called the death of death, by a vehement indignation of spirit against death. So righteousness taketh the name of sin, because it condemneth sin, and this condemning of sin is true righteousness. (Luther : ; LW .–)

Luther revels in the paradoxes, and in this he surely reflects much of Paul’s rhetoric. At the same time, he expresses his own deep revolutionary passion, his desire to overturn and subvert dominant contemporary discourse, which oppressed him in his monastic life and which left him with deep scars. Paul expresses his doctrine in terms which shock and offend; the false apostles would say, like Luther’s opponents, that if you want to live to God, you should live to the Law, or after the Law. ‘But contrariwise we say: If thou wilt live to God, thou must utterly die to the law.’ And this conflicts with what is a ‘special principle among all the divines: He that liveth after the law, liveth unto God’ (Luther : –; LW .). Such a manner of speaking is very pleasant and full of consolation . . . it entereth more easily into the mind and sticketh faster in the memory. Moreover, when he saith: ‘I through the law am dead to the law,’ it soundeth more sweetly than if he should say: I through liberty am dead to the law. For he setteth before us, as it were, a certain picture, as if the law were fighting against the law. As though he should say: O Law, if thou canst accuse me, terrify me, and bind me, I will set above and against thee another law, that is to say, another tyrant and tormentor, which shall accuse thee, bind thee and oppress thee. (Luther : ; LW .)

By this means he brings his readers from beholding the Law, sin and death as their enemies, to contemplating instead ‘death fighting against death, that I may obtain life; Christ fighting against the devil, that I may be the child of God; and destroying hell, that I may enjoy the kingdom of heaven’ (Luther : ; LW .). This is Luther at his best as a close, passionate and intuitive reader of texts. There is, however, a limit to Luther’s revolutionary zeal. In his conscience, he may be free from the Law, but his flesh must still be subject to it: ‘[f]or the flesh may not be at liberty, but must remain in the grave, the prison, the couch:



Galatians :–

it must be in subjection to the law, and exercised by the Egyptians’ (Luther : ; LW .). The Law may dispute with ‘my flesh and members my servants: teach them, exercise and crucify them, but trouble not me, not Conscience, I say, which am a lady and a queen, and have nothing to do with thee’ (Luther : –; LW .). Here we see the sharp divide which is found in much of Luther’s writings, between the inner sphere of the conscience and the outer, public sphere of the flesh, where discipline is needed, between the worldly and the spiritual spheres (Regimente). The Law may no longer reign in the spiritual realm of the conscience, but it still reigns in the sphere of the flesh, the world. It is clear that Luther is much exercised himself by the question of social order and right conduct. The disciplining and crucifying of the flesh are in part a response to these issues, in part an inheritance from the ascetic disciplines of the Fathers and the medieval church. But what of good works in the believer? For Luther, the Christian’s freedom from the Law is a freedom to live to God. Good works flow from this new life in God; they are not a condition of attaining such a life: ‘these ought to be done, not as a cause, but as the fruits of righteousness.’ When we are ‘made righteous (iusti facti), we ought to do them; but not contrariwise, to the end that when we are unrighteous, we may be made righteous. The tree maketh the apple, but not the apple the tree’ (Luther : ; LW .). It is true that the old life of Paul, to which he has died, still lives on. ‘I live indeed and yet not I, but Christ lives in me.’ Luther comments: ‘There is then a double life. The first is mine, which is natural or animal; the second is the life of another, that is to say, the life of Christ in me’ (Luther : ; LW .). But equally, he stresses the close unity between Christ and the believer’s conscience. When Paul speaks of being crucified with Christ (as opposed to crucifying the flesh), he is talking of that ‘high crucifying, whereby sin, the devil and death are crucified in Christ, and not in me. Here Christ doth all himself alone. But I believing in Christ, am by faith crucified also with Christ, so that all these things are crucified and dead also unto me’ (Luther : ; LW .). The new life of the believer is based on an intimate union between the believer and Christ. ‘Christ is my form [my furniture and perfection] adorning and beautifying my faith, as the colour or the clear light do garnish and beautify the wall. (Thus we are constrained grossly to set forth this matter. For we cannot spiritually conceive, that Christ is so nearly joined and united unto us, as the light and whiteness are unto the wall)’ (Luther : ; LW .). Such a conjunction (inhaerentia) translates the believer into the realm of Christ where evil cannot hurt him. Moreover, ‘because Christ liveth in me, therefore, whatsoever of grace, righteousness, life, peace and salvation is in me, it is all his, and yet notwithstanding the same is mine also, by that inseparable union and conjunction (per conglutinationem et inhaesionem) which is through faith; by the

Galatians :–



which Christ and I are made as it were one body in spirit’ (Luther : ; LW .–). This life in intimate union with Christ is the true life of faith, not to be confused with the schoolmen’s notion of faith which requires to be informed by charity. Like Aquinas, Luther here adopts Paul’s impersonal imagery to express the intimacy of the relationship between the believer and Christ. At the same time, he is deeply alert to the extraordinary nature of Paul’s discourse here: ‘Paul hath his peculiar phrase or kind of speech, which is not after the manner of men, but divine and heavenly, nor used of the Evangelists or of the rest of the Apostles, saving only of John’ (Luther : ; LW .). Such language is ‘not of the flesh, but of the Holy Ghost, and of Christ’ (Luther : ; LW .). Insofar as the Christian still lives in the flesh, there is no outward difference between him and all other men and women. But because he does not live of himself, there is a great difference. ‘[T]hat which I now live in the flesh, I live in the faith of the Son of God. This which I now speak, springeth out of another fountain than that which thou heardest of me before’ (Luther : –; LW .). There is then a real change: the righteousness of the Christian is not something simply imputed to him, insofar as by faith he can lay claim to the alien righteousness of Christ. By virtue of his intimate union in faith with Christ, there is within him a spring of righteousness, such that the fruits of good works spring from it.

Calvin Calvin’s treatment is a greatly compressed version of Luther’s, less passionate, directed against patristic (Origen and Jerome) and Roman interpretations which water down Paul’s claim that no one is justified by works of the Law by taking it to refer to the ceremonial law only. On such a view, the moral law would still be effective in respect of a person’s justification. Calvin concedes that the dispute was in the first place about ceremonial matters of the Law, but argues that ‘the context shows clearly that the moral law is also comprehended in these words, for almost everything that Paul adds relates to the moral rather than the ceremonial law’. Paul, that is to say, passed ‘from a particular to the whole’ because he ‘was worried not so much about ceremonies being observed as that the confidence and glory of salvation should be transferred to works’ (Calvin : –). Paul opposes the false apostles, who were pressing for observance of the ceremonial law, not by insisting on the moral law, but rather by insisting on the grace of Christ alone. Calvin pursues the same kind of careful analysis of the grammatical sense of the text when he examines the next phrase: ‘but by the faith of Jesus Christ’.



Galatians :–

He does not merely mean that ceremonies or works of any kind are insufficient without the aid of faith, but he meets their denial with an exclusive statement, as if he had said, ‘Not by works but by the faith of Christ alone.’ Otherwise his statement would have been trivial and irrelevant. For the false apostles did not reject Christ or faith, but demanded that ceremonies should be joined with them. . . . Let it therefore remain settled that this proposition is exclusive, that we are justified in no other way than by faith, or, which comes to the same thing, that we are justified by faith alone. (Calvin : –)

This is a crucial exegetical point in the confessional debates about justification: is it faith alone, or faith informed by love – faith as a mere shell which requires to be filled – which saves? But this very debate all too easily leads to a modification of Luther’s own deepest intuitions. For him faith was not an empty shell, because its very form was Christ, who was apprehended, seized hold of, in faith. As the debate between Reformers and Catholics sharpens, the question, of what it is that justifies, gives to such affirmations a different character. When Calvin insists that it is faith, not faith informed by love, the very context of the argument is pressing his theology into a more thoroughly forensic mode: it is the believer’s act of faith which assures each of them of their – imputed – righteousness, that God has forgiven and pardoned them. This in turn will bring greater attention to bear on the particular character of the believer’s faith, as Christians in this tradition struggle to assure themselves of their acceptance. What, then, of the role of the Law in the process of salvation? Calvin, guided by Romans , takes the phrase ‘I through the law died to the law’ to refer to the way in which the Law with its demands brings those who attempt to obey it to despair. That is, unlike Luther, he construes ‘through the law’ to refer to the Old Testament Law, not to the law of grace: ‘[i]t was not necessary that Christ should annihilate the righteousness of the law, for the law itself slays its disciples’ (Calvin : ). He considers two possible meanings of the phrase ‘to die to the law’: either ‘to renounce it and to be freed from its dominion, so that we have no confidence in it and it does not hold us captive under the yoke of slavery’; or ‘as it gives us all up to destruction, we find no life in it’. While the first sense is one clearly to be found in Luther, Calvin, who looked to the Law to provide guidance for the life of believers, opts for the second sense, for ‘the law bears within itself the curse which slays us’ (Calvin : ). Its positive sense is to be found in the phrase ‘living unto God’. Punctuating in a non-standard way: ‘That I might live unto God, I have been crucified with Christ’, he takes it not as meaning to regulate one’s life according to God’s will, but rather as to ‘live, so to say, the life of God’. Thus, like Luther, he takes the language of Christ’s living in the believer in a thoroughly realistic sense. ‘Engrafted into the death of Christ, we derive a secret energy from it, as the shoot does from the root . . . so that Christ may be said to live and grow’ in us (Calvin : ).

Galatians :–



The life of Christ in the believer has two senses for Calvin: one, the governance of the believer’s actions by Christ’s Spirit; the other, participation in Christ’s righteousness ‘that, since we can do nothing of ourselves (Fr: cannot of ourselves be acceptable to him), we are accepted in Him by God. The first relates to regeneration, the second to the free acceptance (Fr. imputation, : ) of righteousness’ (: ). It is in this second sense, that Calvin, takes the present passage. However, he adds (in the French) I would find it better if it could be taken in both senses. Implicit in this discussion is a sense that justification and regeneration are two separate, if related, processes. This is an intriguing and elusive passage in Calvin. He is clearly strongly drawn to the realistic language of union in this passage of Paul and, at the same time, deeply committed to an understanding of righteousness as imputed. In this latter sense, a clear gap lies between him and Luther. At the same time, like Luther, he is drawn to the realistic language of the passage and goes on to speak of the union through faith as a ‘secret hidden from the senses of man . . . inwardly perceived in the conscience by the power of the Spirit’. Like Luther, he finds the union between Christ and the believer in the inner sanctum of the human conscience. And yet this is not just a metaphorical way of speaking about the conscience as the seat of our moral consciousness: ‘we so live in the world that we also live in heaven; not only because our Head is there, but because, in virtue of union, we have a life in common with him (John .ff.)’ (Calvin : ).

Perkins When Perkins writes his commentary on Galatians, the lines of Calvinist teaching are much more sharply defined. Justification is now to be understood in purely forensic terms: ‘[t]he word, Justifie, is borrowed from courts of judgement, and signifies a judiciall act. Otherwhiles it is put for the action of the judge, and then it signifies to absolve, or to pronounce innocent.’ On this basis, Perkins can distinguish with confidence between justification, regeneration and renovation. ‘Regeneration is usually in scripture, the change of the inward man, whereby we are borne anew. Renovation is, the change both of the inward and outward man, that is, both of heart and life. Justification, is neither, but a certaine action in God applied unto us, or a certaine respect or relation, whereby we are acquit of our sinnes, and accepted to life everlasting’ (Perkins : ). The way is then open for further definition of the nature of each stage of this process. Faith is above all the apprehension of Christ and his benefits. It is not itself the action of God which forgives, but the action of men and women without which the benefits of that act of forgiveness are not received. It therefore



Galatians :–

becomes extremely important for the believer to know whether his faith is true faith, and this leads to growing introspection and inwardness. Faith is not, as the Catholics teach, ‘a physicall transmutation of the quality and disposition of hearts from evill, to good’. Faith is the assurance of forgiveness received by those who fly in despair and deep anxiety to Christ (Perkins : –). But what if doubts persist? Perkins distinguishes degrees of apprehension, weak and strong, ‘as there is a weake and a strong faith’. All faith partakes of certainty; however not all faith has ‘fullnesse of certenty’ (Perkins : –). While insisting that faith is truly the apprehension of the benefits of Christ’s obedience to God, Perkins wants to play down the differences in confidence that may be found in – true – believers. ‘We must put difference between true apprehension, and strong apprehension. If we truly apprehend, though not strongly, it sufficeth. The palsied hand is able to receive a gift, though not as strongly as an other’ (Perkins : ). What he does not want to play down is the difference between true faith, which consists in the apprehension of Christ’s work, and ‘the poor and miserable faith of the Papists’, who simply accept the teaching of the church without really knowing what it is, or of the majority of Protestants, ‘whose faith is their good meaning, that is, their fidelitie, and truth in their dealings’ (Perkins : ). Faith justifies not because of its strength or ardour, but ‘because it is an instrument to apprehend, and apply that which justifieth, namely, Christ and his obedience’ (Perkins : ); there is, that is to say, a distinction between faith’s apprehension of its object and the effects of that object as apprehended in the life of the believer. So Perkins speaks of regeneration as that which enables the reception of spiritual life; this is not the work of the believer but the ‘action, motion, or operation of the Spirit in us’. Nevertheless, this new spiritual life is encompassed by many rules which the believer must observe if he is to live to God ‘wisely, godly and justly’ (Perkins : ). These include labouring ‘with all diligence, and with all speed, that we may be worthy to stand before the Sonne of man at his comming’, as well as coming as close to heaven as possible by joining ourselves to the ‘assemblies where the word is preached, prayer is made, and Sacraments administred: for there is the gate of heaven’. Godly living means knowing God’s will and acknowledging it, ‘bring[ing] our selves in subjection to the known will of God, and captivat[ing] all our senses unto it’. It also requires our being silent ‘in all our miseries and adversities’ and ‘depending on the goodnesse, providence, and mercie of God, for the successe of our labours, and for ease or deliverance out of miserie’ (Perkins : –). To use the terms employed by a later Pauline commentator, E.P. Sanders, for Perkins justification is the means whereby we ‘get in’ to the Christian community; regeneration is the means by which we are enabled to embark on the spiritual life of the community of the faithful; renovation is the process whereby we

Galatians :–



‘stay in’, which may lead the believer to heaven. Maybe it is the continuing influence of Perkins’s puritanism which makes the notion of covenantal nomism so attractive to many evangelical commentators.

Baur At the heart of Christianity, for Baur, lay the dawning of a new universal principle of consciousness in Paul, radically opposed to the particularist Jewish principles which had led him to persecute the early Christian church. Everything that was national and Jewish in the Messianic idea . . . was at once removed from the consciousness of our apostle by the one fact of the death of Jesus . . . Jesus, as the Messiah, had died to Judaism, had been removed beyond his national connexion with it, and placed in a freer, more universal, and purely spiritual sphere, where the absolute importance which Judaism claimed till then was at once obliterated.

Paul now no longer knew Christ after the flesh ( Cor :), but saw in the death of Christ the purification of the Messianic idea from all the sensuous elements which cleaved to it in Judaism, and its elevation to the truly spiritual consciousness where Christ comes to be recognised as . . . the absolute principle of the spiritual life. (Baur : –)

All this comes to expression in Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith. If the Christian spiritual consciousness is above all a ‘consciousness of the sonship of God, of communion and union with God, of reconciliation with Him’, what the doctrine of justification by faith addresses is the question of how this reconciliation has been brought about, which is characteristically expressed in terms of the antithesis between justification by works and justification by faith. Precisely because it spans these two concepts, righteousness, dikaiosunē, ‘is not here the term of a particular religion, but of a universal one’. It is not a purely forensic term, but rather ‘[b]y the expression . . . the apostle denotes that adequate relation towards God, into which it is the highest task of religion to bring man . . . . Man can become blessed only by having in himself that which is the condition of blessedness, and the conception of dikaiosunē is in general just this moral conformation which is the condition of his blessedness, and therefore puts him in his right relation towards God.’ Baur is distancing himself here not only from forensic views of (imputed) justification, but also rejecting Luther’s claim that the genitive in the phrase the ‘righteousness of God’ is to be understood as indicating that righteousness by faith is a gift of God.



Galatians :–

There are, potentially at least, two kinds of righteousness: that by works of the Law and that by faith. The former, which Baur describes as referring to ‘righteousness as the statutory perfection of the citizen in the theocratic state, or morality in its merely legal aspect’ (Baur : ), is the Jewish kind of righteousness and is mediated by the Law. Such righteousness, Paul argues, is ‘not possible at all’ (Baur : ). The problem lies with the spirituality of the Law. Were man by nature purely spiritual, then such righteousness would be possible: as it is, the fact that he is also carnal makes it impossible. Because of this divided nature, ‘what takes place in man when the law comes to him with its demands is just that opposition by which his whole nature is brought into conflict with itself, in which the flesh lusts against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh’ (Baur : ; Gal :). The conflict, which Paul describes in Romans , is the conflict which the Law arouses within non-believers, the ‘antagonism of the carnal man and the spiritual law’ (Baur : ). Men and women outside Christ do indeed have a spiritual apprehension of the law through their minds (nous), but this can lead to the ‘righteousness of God’ only if the nous is transformed into the pneuma; that is to say, if a new spiritual consciousness is born in the believer. This is the true righteousness ‘not in the way of works of the law’, but ‘only in the way of faith’. Such faith comes externally from the preaching of the gospel (Gal :, ), and ‘thus it is primarily a recognition of the truth of the contents of the gospel’. And because Christ is the ‘essential contents of the gospel, this pistis (faith) becomes pistis Iesou Christou, Gal. ii. , the faith of which Christ is the object, or pistis en Christo Iesou, Gal. iii. , the faith which has in Christ the principle on which it rests’ (Baur : –). This faith is further defined in terms of Christ’s atoning death, and as faith in the God who raised him from the dead, having given him over for our trespasses and raised him for our justification (Rom :–). In this way, the more the content of faith is specified, the more it moves from theoretical assent to ‘a practical trust in which man’s deepest interests find expression. This trust becomes in turn a certainty of conviction, in which what has once been taken up into the subjective consciousness, even though a mere representation or expectation, has all the force of an immediate objective reality.’ Here we need to note his closeness to Luther (despite his disagreement over the nature of the genitive in the phrase ‘the righteousness of God’): Christ is both the object of faith and present in the faith itself. Faith can effect what works cannot, but not of its own efforts. ‘[F]aith does not of itself possess this mediating power; all that it is, it is only in virtue of the object to which it is directed’ (Baur : ). Faith, that is to say, is a negative capability, the apprehension of that which can possess the soul, and so can raise its consciousness to the level of the spiritual. It is interesting to refer forward here to more recent debates about the

Galatians :–



understanding of the phrase ‘the faith of Christ’ (Kertelge ; Dunn ; Hays ; Betz : –; Martyn b: –). Against the view propounded by Baur and Luther, that pistis Christou should be understood as human faith in Christ (as an ‘objective genitive’), Hays, Martyn and others have argued that pistis Christou should be taken as referring to the faith of Christ (as a ‘genitive of authorship or of origin’; Martyn b: , n. ). Martyn takes this short phrase as a reference to ‘God’s rectifying act in Christ, centrally in his death, which Paul always understands to be part of a holistic event including his resurrection’ (Martyn : ). Insofar as the argument turns on the perception that Paul wishes above all to emphasize God’s initiative in justification, and therefore to have Paul assert that even human believing is God’s (not human) work, such a view seems to be in danger of voiding the human reception of such salvific action of any substance at all. In what sense do believers need to be aware of what God has done in Christ? And what would it be for this awareness itself to be the work of God in Christ? Certainly for Baur, with his deep debt to Hegel, what is crucial is the emergence of a new human consciousness, grounded in the apprehension of God’s revelation centred on the death of Christ, a consciousness which breaks the particularistic bounds of contemporary beliefs in the Messiah and unites the believer spiritually with Christ.

Lightfoot Lightfoot’s paraphrase of vv. – ends ‘thus our Christian profession is in itself an acknowledgement that such ritual observances are worthless and void’ (Lightfoot : ), taking Paul’s more general claim ‘not justified by works of the law’ to be directed in this case to the issue of Jewish dietary laws. However, as his earlier excursus on Paul’s ‘sojourn in Arabia’ makes clear, for Lightfoot, Paul’s religious experience had brought home to him the ‘bleak desolation, which [the Law] created and was intended to create in the soul of man’, and this experience had transformed him from ‘the champion of a bigoted and narrow tradition into the large-hearted Apostle of the Gentiles’ (Lightfoot : ). Similarly, Lightfoot paraphrases v. : ‘If after destroying the old ceremonial, I attempt to build it up again, I condemn myself, I testify to my guilt in the work of destruction’, but, again, takes Paul’s ‘these things’ to refer to the ‘Mosaic law’ and suggests that what Paul is saying is that there is ‘no sin at all in abandoning the law’(Lightfoot : ). What, then, does Paul mean by ‘dying to law through law’? There are two senses, so Lightfoot, in which the Law may be seen as a schoolmaster leading to Christ, either in respect of its place in the divine economy (the Law itself reveals its transitory character) or in relation to its moral effects (revealing, provoking, even creating, sin). Lightfoot rejects



Galatians :–

the first option partly on linguistic grounds: Paul normally uses nomos (law) with the article to speak of the Mosaic Law; without the article ‘law’ is ‘considered as a principle, exemplified no doubt chiefly and signally in the Mosaic Law, but very much wider than this in its application’ (Lightfoot : ). Thus, far from seeing Paul’s argument as being about a specific aspect of the Mosaic Law, as his reading of vv. – might have suggested, Lightfoot now sees it as raising issues which extend beyond the Mosaic Law itself to embrace morality in general. To live simply by the moral law is to condemn oneself ‘hopelessly, for no one can fulfil all the requirements of the law’, whether it be in the form of the Mosaic Law or in other less ‘efficacious’ ‘codes of precepts and systems of restraint’. All this imposes a form of bondage from which those who believe in Christ are released by dying to the Law and being crucified with Christ. Lightfoot treats these two metaphors as both speaking of the manner in which sin and law ‘loose their hold at the same time. The sense of feebleness, of prostration, to which a man is reduced by the working of the law, the process of dying in fact, is the moral link which unites the two applications of the image. . . . Thus his death becomes life. Being crucified with Christ, he rises with Christ and lives to God’ (Lightfoot : –). What is striking here is the way in which the experience of moral failure is not merely seen as that which disposes a person to accept the proferred new life, but is largely equated with Christ’s action in overcoming the law and the believer’s conjunction with it. Lightfoot, true to his earlier treatment of Paul’s religious experience, is here engaging in a form of experiential or even existential interpretation. The other side of Christian experience, matching the sense of moral failure, is the sense of new life wherein the believer is ‘merged in Christ’, where the life he lives ‘in faith’ refers to ‘the atmosphere as it were which he breathes in this his new spiritual life’ (Lightfoot : ). Lightfoot is not disposed to develop the language of merging with Christ in any realistic/mystical sense. The phrases ‘living unto God’ and ‘being crucified with Christ’ ‘point rather to the moral and spiritual change wrought in the believer’ (Lightfoot : ). But rather than seeing the passage as referring to a shift of consciousness from the particular to the universal, to the establishment of a new universal principle within the believer, as does Baur, Lightfoot sees this as being about the shift from a moral to a new religious righteousness. Moreover, whereas for Baur such a shift in consciousness is achieved in virtue of the rational embrace of a new principle of consciousness, for Lightfoot such a shift is located not within the reason and intellect, but within the heart and conscience. One is reminded in this distinction between a moral and a religious sense of righteousness of Marcion’s earlier, similar distinction. Yet, whereas Baur would distinguish the two forms of righteousness as forms of a developing human consciousness of the divine spirit, thus maintaining the unity of the divine source of such consciousness, Light-

Galatians :–



foot will not entertain the idea that Paul’s gospel was, as he puts it, ‘merely one of the many phases of Judaism’ (Lightfoot : ix); but it is then much harder to account for the profound difference between the two dispensations, without falling into some kind of radical dualism.

Later nineteenth- and twentieth-century readings Baur’s emphasis on the rise of a new universal principle of religious consciousness was sharply challenged by the history of religions school. Scholars like Heitmüller sought to locate Paul’s thought and language in the world of firstcentury popular religion, of the mysteries and other cults. For Heitmüller, Spirit is ‘quite simply a supernatural, transcendent entity, in sharp contrast with the essence and being of humanity’ (Heitmüller : ). Thus, however much for Paul the fruit of the Spirit is to be found in ethical virtues, the Spirit itself is, first and foremost, divine power. Paul, thanks to his ‘animistically based psychology’, thought of Spirit in a far more material way than we do (Riches : ). This Spirit invades believers and unites with believers in a dramatic way, more akin to spirit possession than to the development of a new consciousness. Bultmann, while recognizing the validity of these criticisms, nevertheless acknowledged that Baur’s interpretation ‘is sustained by the recognition that behind Paul’s theological terms . . . there lies a particular understanding of human being. Baur’s interpretation, in posing this question and in its determination to understand everything in its light, is quite simply exemplary’ (Bultmann : ). This provides a clear link with Bultmann’s own programme of existential interpretation, developed in his Theology of the New Testament (Bultmann ) which sought out the self-understanding which was given expression through, and which also led to a considerable distancing from, the mythological forms of thought adopted by Paul. Faith is a response to the word of the cross (Gal :), which calls people to abandon their quest for security and their attempts to control their lives, and instead to live out a life of trust in God, accepting God’s judgement on all human efforts and living out of God’s grace. For all these interpreters, Paul’s language of justification is central to Paul’s theology. For Schweitzer, by contrast, it was subsidiary to Paul’s central concern with union with, participation in, Christ (Schweitzer , ). Paul’s specifically Christ-centred mysticism (as opposed to God-mysticism) runs thus: I am in Christ; in Him I know myself as a being who is raised above this sensuous, sinful, and transient world and already belongs to the transcendent; in Him I am assured of resurrection; in Him I am a child of God. . . . [B]eing in Christ is conceived as a having died and risen again with Him, in consequence of which the



Galatians :–

participant has been freed from sin and from the Law, possesses the Spirit of Christ, and is assured of resurrection. This ‘being-in-Christ’ is the prime enigma of the Pauline teaching: once grasped it gives the clue to the whole. (Schweitzer : )

Similar as Schweitzer’s views were to those of Baur, he took the view that Paul’s language of justification was essentially forensic and, perhaps for this reason, failed to take adequate account of Baur’s non-forensic reading. The same is true of Schweitzer’s most eloquent advocate E.P. Sanders, who outdoes Schweitzer in his anti-Lutheran polemic, while failing to notice that one of the most influential Lutheran interpreters, Baur, rejects both Luther’s view that Paul’s talk of justification is to be understood forensically and his view that the ‘righteousness of God’ refers to God’s gift of righteousness to the believer. Insofar as Sanders argues that German Lutheran forensic readings of Paul are closely linked to a deeply negative reading of Judaism, it is worth noting that Baur’s much more participatory reading is no less associated with negative, supersessionist views of Judaism. Sanders’s chosen mode of reading Paul is as vulnerable as is that which he opposes. (For a sympathetic yet sharply critical reading of Baur, see Boyarin .) Sanders argues that for Paul ‘justification’ is principally (in Romans and Galatians) one among a number of transfer terms which refer to the believer’s entry into the Christian community, ‘getting in’. Specifically, it refers to the believer’s being cleansed from his/her sins, being reconciled, and this can be compared with Paul’s other ways of referring to this transition, which refer more to a transfer of lordship from the power of sin to the lordship of Christ (Sanders : –). In Galatians it is used antithetically in the contrast between justification by works and justification by faith to refute the claims of those who insist that observance of the Law is necessary for securing religious blessings of many kinds (‘righteousness, the promise of Abraham, the Spirit, life and the like’; Sanders : ) and to assert, by contrast, that it is faith which makes possible the receipt of such benefits. ‘Further, righteousness, the Spirit, life and the like are thus available to all, whether Jew or Gentile, without distinction and on the same basis (Gal ., f.)’ (Sanders : ). However, the centre of his thought lies not in this kind of juridical, forensic imagery, but in the language of participation. Paul can sometimes use the language of justification to explicate what he expresses primarily in participationist terms; he does not work the other way round. What distinguishes Sanders work sharply from that of Baur, Schweitzer and Bultmann is that he does not regard it as being in any sense a contribution to the theological appropriation of Paul’s thought. Paul may speak of participation in Christ, but Sanders has no categories available to him which would enable him to make sense of such language. Bultmann’s emphasis on Paul’s talk

Galatians :–



of ‘trust, obedience, renunciation of one’s own striving’ reflects aspects of Paul’s thought and is still readily accessible; but it is not ‘the real and exhaustive interpretation of what Paul meant. What he really thought was just what he said: that Christ was appointed Lord by God for the salvation of all who believe, that those who believe belong to the Lord and become one with him, and that in virtue of their incorporation in the Lord they will be saved on the Day of the Lord’ (Sanders : ). While Sanders’s reading has been widely influential, perhaps not least because of the fire which he has directed against anti-Judaistic readings of Paul, in one sense it represents a refusal to meet the interpretative challenges which these last ten verses of Galatians  pose the interpreter. For, as we have seen, the task for the interpreters is to do justice both to the sharp contrast which Paul makes between ‘works of the Law’ and faith in Christ as the means of securing ‘righteousness’ and to the language of participation and mystical union which he uses to describe the relation between Christ and the believer in the last part of the chapter. In the end, Sanders’s reading amounts to a down-playing of the first pole of this tension and a declaration that the second is beyond our comprehension. This is a strange view to take of a text which has exercised such influence throughout  years of human history.



Galatians : in the Mystical Tradition

As we have seen, Gal :, with its emphasis on the intimate union between the believer and Christ, has exercised a strong influence on the literary history of the letter, providing a counterbalance to those voices which would read the section :– principally in the light of :. Within the mystical tradition this verse has played an enormously important role, which can be only lightly sketched in here. The fifth- to sixth-century anonymous mystical theologian Pseudo-Dionysius outlines a schema by which the soul may progress from contemplation of God in the world to an ecstatic unknowing (agnosia) of God. God in his nature is ‘unknowable and beyond the reach of mind or of reason. But we know him from the arrangement of everything, because everything is in a sense projected out of him, and this order possesses certain images and semblances of his divine paradigms.’ For Pseudo-Dionysius, the world was ordered and arranged into ‘hierarchies’. God in himself was hidden, unknowable, but manifested himself in creation, in going out of himself and creating an ordered world, ‘a sacred order, a state of understanding and an activity approximating as closely as possible to the divine’ (CH .; PG .D; Pseudo-Dionysius : ).



Galatians :–

Thus God is approached partly by enlightenment, as the mind strives to know him through the order of the sacred hierarchy, partly by passing beyond such knowledge to know God through unknowing. (DN .; PG .D; PseudoDionysius : ). Such a movement, Dionysius describes as ecstasy, a going out of oneself, in order to be united to the unknowable God. Ecstasy is in the first place to be predicated of God. God ‘stands outside himself in the eros that constitutes the world (DN .; PG .A)’, as he ‘always remains perfectly in himself and outside all things’. So too, ‘[d]riven by the yearning . . . which suffuses the universe, the soul strives upward by means of negations, “since this stands the soul outside everything which is correlative to its own finite nature” (DN .; PG .B)’ (McGinn : –). And here Pseudo-Dionysius appeals to Paul, whom he claims as his teacher: This is why the great Paul, swept along by his yearning for God and seized of its ecstatic power, had this inspired word to say: ‘It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me’ (Gal :). Paul was truly a lover and, as he says, he was beside himself for God ( Cor :), possessing not his own life but the life of the One for whom he yearned, as exceptionally beloved. (DN .; PG .A; PseudoDionysius : )

This passage from Pseudo-Dionysius is taken up much later by the Italian Franciscan, Ubertino of Casale (c.–c.), who speaks of the annihilation of the self. After quoting DN ., he adds: ‘Ecstasy means “making outside the self ”; hence spiritual men are called ecstatics, i.e. “made outside themselves”, by thinking of God, not themselves, in everything.’ But whereas PseudoDionysius’s way to ecstasy had led through contemplation of the ordered hierarchy of the created world and the church, Ubertino’s contemplation is focused on Christ’s cross, reflecting in this Paul’s ‘I have been crucified with Christ’. McGinn presents Ubertino’s views as follows: Just as there is no human person or ‘supposit’ in the philosophical sense in Jesus, but a total emptying of the human personality, ‘so too ought it to be in you, soul, who wishes to attain to the perfection of his cross.’ Whoever wishes to be united to God by love and will ‘through perfect abnegation,’ must surrender all love of self and others, even all will, so that ‘the Holy Spirit itself seems as if it is your love and your will and you will nothing, for yourself, but only for Jesus: you will nothing but him and because of him. And from such following of the cross will come sorrow and joy in equal measure. (McGinn : , quoting Ubertinus de Casali : b)

It is interesting to compare Ubertino’s reading, with its strong emphasis on annihilation of the self, with the use which St John of the Cross makes of Gal

Galatians :–



: in his commentary on his poem The Spiritual Canticle. Written while he was imprisoned in a dungeon in Toledo, it clearly draws on the imagery of the Song of Songs and speaks of the soul’s love for Christ and their union. In stanza , the soul prays O crystalline fount. If on that thy silvered surface Thou wouldst of a sudden form the eyes desired Which I bear outlined in my inmost parts.

In the commentary on the poem, John explains that this is the soul, in her desire for union with the Spouse, addressing faith and asking it to direct her to the Beloved. The articles of faith have indeed been infused into her soul, yet her knowledge of them is not perfect, and therefore she says that the knowledge of faith is merely an outline. Besides this outline of faith, there is, however, another outline of love, and this is according to the will: wherein the image of the Beloved is outlined in such a manner, and so completely pictured, when there is union of love, that it is true to say that the Beloved lies in the lover and the lover in the Beloved; and such manner of likeness does love make in the transformation of the two that are in love that it may be said that each is the other and that both are one. . . . Thus each lives in the other, and the one is the other, and both are one through the transformation of love. It is this that St. Paul meant when he said: . . . I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me. For in saying ‘I live, yet not I,’ he meant that, although he lived, his life was not his own, because he was transformed in Christ and his life was divine rather than human. (St John of the Cross : ii.)

In the Spiritual Canticle, John describes the progress of the soul towards union with God, which he calls ‘the spiritual marriage’. This is a way which leads from mortification through meditation on spiritual things to contemplation and then in the spiritual betrothal to the unitive way ‘wherein it receives many and very great communications and visits and gifts and jewels from the spouse’. The passage just quoted, in which John first refers to Gal :, was located just at the point where the soul enters on the spiritual betrothal. The text appears again at the point in the poem which marks the transition to the spiritual marriage: ‘The Bride has entered into the pleasant garden of her desire.’ It is clear that whatever the hardships of the passage to this point, here the desires of the soul are fulfilled beyond measure. Drawing on the imagery of the Song of Songs :, he writes that in this state the Spouse has now gathered His fragrant myrrh and aromatic spices, which are the fruits of the flowers, now ripe and made ready for the soul, the which fruits are the delights and grandeurs that He Himself communicates to her in this estate – that is, He



Galatians :–

communicates them to her in Himself; for the which cause He is to her the pleasant garden of her desire. . . . [F]or in this estate she finds much greater abundance and fullness of God and peace more sure and stable, and a sweetness more perfect without compare than in the Spiritual Betrothal, since she is now placed in the arms of such a Spouse, Whose close spiritual embrace she habitually feels – a true embrace, by means of which the soul lives the life of God. (St. John of the Cross : ii.)

And there follows Gal :. Nor are these the only significant uses of the text. In The Living Flame of Love, the text is used to explicate the line: ‘In slaying, thou hast changed death into life’, which resonates nicely with the opening clause of :, ‘I have been crucified with Christ’. What the passage discusses in some detail is the process whereby the natural operations of the soul, of the memory, the understanding and the will, are transformed through its union with God, in such a way that its operations are in God. Thus the will which aforetime loved after a low manner, that of death, and with its natural affection, has now been changed into the life of Divine love; for it loves after a lofty manner with Divine affection and is moved by the power and strength of the Holy Spirit in Whom it now lives the life of love, since, through this union, its will and His will are now only one. . . . And in this way the soul is dead to all that was in itself, for this was death to it, and alive to that which God is in Himself. (St John of the Cross : iii.–)

And again, there follows the quotation of Gal :. There are striking similarities between this account of the operations of the soul and Aquinas’s, which we noticed above, with both of them paying their debt to Aristotelian understandings of psychology.

Keiji Nishitani and the Kyoto school of Zen Buddhism It is intriguing to see how this text provokes mystics to reflect on the nature of their experience of God and the implications of this for their understanding of human nature and identity, which is posed by Paul’s formulation: I yet not I. A final example comes from outside the Christian tradition altogether and brings out its fruitfulness for this kind of reflection in a remarkably refreshing way. The Kyoto school of Zen Buddhism, which ‘strives for an integration of Zen and the spirit of the Western world’ (Ueda : ) was founded by Kitaro Nishida (–) and further developed by Keiji Nishitani (–). We shall approach this through the eyes of Shizuteru Ueda, a successor of Nishitani’s at Kyoto, who has written extensively on Eckhart.

Galatians :–



Nishida cites the words of Gal : frequently, ‘employing them together with examples from Buddhism in his analysis of religion and thus of the elemental structure of human being. In this context Nishida speaks of “immanent transcendence” as the basic structure of existence.’ ‘The self is found in its ground to be ungrounded within the infinite openness’ (Ueda : , ). Such talk of the self as groundless is taken up by Nishitani in his exploration of the European nihilist tradition, particularly of the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. In a paper given to Heidegger’s seminar in Heidelberg in , Nishitani linked the thought of Nietzsche and Eckhart, both figures who explore, in radically different ways, the Nothingness of God. In the Preface to his first main work, published shortly afterwards in , Philosophy of the Original Self, Nishitani wrote, ‘The final ground of that I-am is without ground and groundless. In the origin of life there is nothing to set the feet upon. This is how life is original life’ (cited in Ueda : ). Such a view of the self as ‘hovering in nothingness’ has close links with Nietzsche’s rejection of any answer to the question ‘Why?’ in his talk of the death of God. Like Nietzsche, Nishitani affirms the creativity and freedom of this groundless self. AsUeda puts it: ‘That I am is a creative event out of nothingness, and that is without a creator. Creation without a creator is highly creative.’ Ueda’s commentary links this with Eckhart, who writes: ‘That I am belongs neither to God nor to Creation (. . .)’ That is the ultimate freedom. Breaking through the experienced unio mystica, Meister Eckhart makes this assertion not out of the unitum but immediately out of the unum or out of nothingness, which is how he thinks of the essence of God. Eckhart lets the lively living life speak, that I live because I live (. . .). This is about the life ‘without why’ (‘ohne warum’). That is the pure life. . . . In this way Nishitani says in concert with Eckhart that I live because I live. Out of Nothingness life lives, originally, without ‘why’. No longer conditioned through the ‘reason why’ but rather originating from itself, it is inexhaustibly fulfilled. In the fundamental statement of Nishitani we have seen a double meaning, which is true to Nishitani’s intention: In his fundamental statement Nishitani shares the radical nihilism of Nietzsche. But now with this he is espousing the thinking of Eckhart as well – that life without why is the pure and fulfilled life. (Ueda : )

It might initially seem as if this encounter between Japanese Zen Buddhists and Paul’s gnomic text was purely accidental, a chance exchange springing from the ease with which the verse from Galatians lends itself to transposition into the form of a Buddhist koan. Ueda tells the story of a conversation between Nishitani and a Japanese Christian theologian, Kazuo Muto (–) with whom Nishitani had a long-standing friendship. They had been discussing Gal : ‘as had become quite natural by then’, which they both recognized as theologically and personally fundamental. ‘“Yes”, said Nishitani with full sympathy,



Galatians :–

but then asked Muto, “Who speaks these words actually? Paul? Or another?”’ (Ueda ). But it is clear from what we have already seen that this encounter is a far from casual occurrence. The text which becomes ‘the fundamental text most favored by the Kyoto-school in their understanding of Christianity’ (Ueda : ) is first used by Nishida, for whom it speaks, in ways which can be linked with Buddhist texts, of the elemental structure of human being: ‘In the ground of the Self there is nothing that determines and decides the Self itself ’ (Ueda : ). Yet it is not just its consonance with certain Buddhist texts which makes it so important, but rather its centrality in the Christian mystical tradition . Nishitani’s interest in Western nihilism is related to its global influence. Such Western nihilism has the effect of destroying original traditions in those non-European countries which come under its influence. As a result, non-European countries like Japan are weaker against nihilism. Therefore if something is to be done against nihilism, it must occur first and foremost in the European world . . . Nishitani’s Zen-eye discovers in Eckhart’s ‘life without why’ a possible answer, addressing the world-misery springing from nihilism; and a necessary answer, arising out of the same European context which spawned Nietzsche.’ (Ueda : )

Yet it is no more than a possible answer, if it remains at the theoretical level. The link between Nietzsche’s and Eckhart’s nihilism has to be lived out if it is to offer a real solution to Western nihilism. The answer lies in the Zen practice of Zazen. ‘On the Zen way the point is “into-nothingness-and-out-ofnothingness”. Nishitani himself walks this path. In practice, through Zazen, it is to die into nothingness and to awake and rise again to live out of nothingness’ (Ueda : ). And this, in turn, echoes the language of dying to the law and living to God, of being crucified with Christ of Gal :. Thus, far from being the outcome of a chance encounter with a superficially attractive text, Nishitani’s prolonged interest in Gal : springs from an urgent desire to find elements in the Western tradition which can help him in his attempts to overcome Western nihilism, to overcome illusory notions of the self, and to discover the true life lived out of Nothingness. At the same time, this discovery of these deep springs within the Western, Christian tradition leads him to pose a challenge to Christianity, ‘whereby the crucial point is that Jesus is the person who lives out this link perfectly’ (Ueda : ). Hence his question: ‘Who speaks these words actually? Paul? Or another?’ is designed to encourage Christian theologians themselves to undergo the existential movement into the groundless nothingness and out of the nothingness, with dying and rising again to life. . . . For as a Zen Buddhist understands

Galatians :–



it, ‘Christ’ (in this case Jesus Christ) is here the name for the event of death/ resurrection, not for life’s ground of being. Thus the name ‘Jesus Christ’ is transparent for the event of death/resurrection, so that the ground of the new life is groundless. Jesus Christ as a historical person is then a ratification of the reality of the groundless death/resurrection. (Ueda : –)

Galatians :–

Life in the Spirit Contrasted with Living under the Curse of the Law

Overview Having set out the main lines of his position against his opponents in :– (his propositio, according to Betz : –), Paul now turns to proving it (the probatio, which runs from : to :), first by appealing to the Galatians’ own experience (vv. –), then by appealing through Scripture to the example of Abraham (vv. –; Betz : –). Not all accept this analysis: for Chrysostom (NPNF .), skilled in ancient rhetoric (Heath ; Mitchell ), Paul here moves from establishing his authority (not of men, not by men, nor needing to be supplemented by that of the apostles) to a comparison Galatians Through the Centuries, First Edition. John Riches. © 2013 John Riches. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Galatians :–



(sygkrisis) of law and faith, conducted in a more discursive, confident manner. In favour of Betz’s analysis, it could be said that Paul has already introduced the subject of the Law in :– (Betz’s propositio), and that there is a clear element of proof in this section, not least in the appeal to Abraham and to Scripture. Others follow Chrysostom, seeing here a major division in the epistle: Aquinas distinguishes the earlier chapters in which Paul had appealed to the authority of evangelical doctrine to ‘reprove the Galatians for their vanity and fickleness’ from the following two chapters in which he shows by reason and authority that matters of the law are not to be observed (Aquinas : ; : ). The difficulty here, as is seen clearly by Betz (: , n. , for references to patristic discussions of the matter), is that :– can be seen both as the conclusion to the account of the conflict at Antioch and as the statement, without argument, of Paul’s basic convictions about the matter which is centrally in dispute, which statement then leads on into the argument proper of chapters  and . However that may be, the chapter starts with an appeal to the Galatians’ experience of the Spirit before they had been tempted to turn to the Law and proceeds to seek scriptural support for Paul’s position by first pointing to the promise of blessing that had been made to Abraham before the giving of the Law, and then citing Scriptures which link the Law with bringing a curse.

 The Argument from the Galatians’ Experience of the Spirit, vv. – Paul’s appeal to the Spirit raises a number of questions. How, first and foremost, is the particular experience of the Spirit, pneuma, to which he appeals to be defined – a crucial question touching the very essence of Christian experience? Is he referring to the occurrence of miracles, the outpouring of love through the Spirit in Christian life (sanctification), the comfort and assurance of salvation, the experience of a new God-consciousness, or indeed to the more overtly charismatic experiences of Christian conversion and initiation? Much turns on how interpreters read the contrasting terms which Paul uses: works of the law/ hearing of faith; beginning in the Spirit/finishing in the flesh. That Paul refers to works of power (miracles of some sort?) which they had experienced, cannot be denied. Other questions arise: How appropriate is Paul’s outburst against the Galatians? What are we to make of the language of witchcraft which Paul uses? What status and authority can persons empowered in the Spirit claim within the church?



Galatians :–

Patristic readings According to Theodore (: –), the great number of miracles performed in Galatia testifies to the fact that the Galatians had received the Spirit. Moreover, this could not have been as a result of their observance of the Law: formerly they were Gentiles, and on their conversion they were not taught to observe the Law. What more, then, did they expect to receive as a result of their observance of the Law? No good could equal the gift of the Spirit, for from this comes resurrection, immortality and unchangeableness. How, then, can they choose instead what is carnal, i.e. mortal? Here Theodore takes the Spirit as the cause of immortality, and the flesh as the cause of mortality. Why should the Galatians, having received the Spirit and the hope of resurrection and immortality, when they will be strangers to all sin, again make themselves as mortals in the custody of the Law? Chrysostom is less concerned with the main lines of Paul’s argument than with the moral propriety of his rhetoric. How, in the light of Mt :, could Paul call the Galatians ‘foolish’? But Jesus says there: whoever shall call his brother a fool ‘without a cause’, and Paul certainly had reason here. In substance, Paul offered ‘concise arguments and a summary method of proof ’, based, not as in the previous chapter on what had occurred elsewhere, but specifically on ‘what was especially conferred’ on the Galatians themselves (NPNF .). Such experience of the Spirit was manifested in the performance by the Galatians of many miracles, which Chrysostom is able to specify: ‘in raising the dead, in cleansing lepers, in prophesying, in speaking with tongues’ (NPNF :). Chrysostom (unlike Theodore) believes that the Galatians were formerly Jews; in their former existence under the Law they could perform no such deeds. The new power conferred by faith made such things possible but they have regressed from the spiritual working of miracles to the fleshly performance of circumcision. The contrast between spirit and flesh is taken as a contrast between truth and its types, between strong meat and milk, not, that is, between things which are fundamentally opposed, as in Theodore and, later, Luther. For Augustine, Paul here develops the claims made in the previous chapter. He begins to show how the grace of faith is sufficient for justification apart from works of the Law, in order to counter those who might think that justification, while not coming solely from works of the Law, nevertheless did not come solely from the grace of faith (Augustine : ). Augustine prefaces his remarks with a further exposition of the distinction between the sacramental and moral aspects of the law. Practices such as circumcision, sabbaths, new moons, sacrifices, etc. are sacraments, i.e. rites which point to the divine but have only a temporary significance, which can be of value but are not neces-

Galatians :–



sary. Prohibitions against murder, adultery, and bearing false witness belong to the moral law and are necessary. He clearly assumes that ‘works of the law’ here refers only to the sacramental, not to the moral law. For the Galatians to revert to the flesh would be to promote disorder: for ‘order consists in rising from carnal to spiritual things, not in falling from spiritual to carnal things’. After all they had suffered, in conquering fear through love, how could they now return to being driven by fear of the Law? What, then, were the gifts of the Spirit which they had received? There had been ‘perceptible miracles . . . when the invitation to faith was new’; but for Augustine the gifts of the Spirit occur principally in the spiritual development of the believer, in the pouring out of love into their hearts, leading them to perform the moral law (Rom :; Augustine : ).

Thomas Aquinas For Aquinas, the manifestations of the Spirit to which Paul appeals (e.g. speaking in tongues in Acts :) occurred in the primitive church to assist the growth of faith in Christ. Like Augustine, he regards such manifestations as things of the past; what is abiding is the gift of the Spirit by which the unjust become just, and receive the spirit of sons (Rom :). Paul’s point is clear: as former Gentiles, the Galatians could not attribute such manifestations of the Spirit to their observation of the Law. Moreover, since it is more difficult to make the unjust just than to preserve the just in their righteousness, the Galatians should not suppose that they need to fall back on the observance of the Law; the virtue (strength) of faith is quite adequate for the purpose. Observance of the Law is carnal, contrasted with the inspiration of the Holy Spirit through which they have embarked on the path of perfection (Aquinas : –; : ). Here Aquinas raises a delicate point: can anyone give the Spirit? The question assumes that ‘he who provides the Spirit’ is to be taken not, as most subsequent commentators would assume to be quite obvious, as referring to God but to Paul! Obvious or not, the medieval tradition took the reference here to be to Paul who ‘through faith received the power of giving the Spirit not in virtue of his authority but of his office/ministry’ (ministerio non auctoritate; Lombard, PL . ). In what sense can human agents of any sort give the Spirit? Ultimately, only God can give the Spirit, but Aquinas allows, rather reluctantly, that the ministers of the church can give the Spirit in the sacraments. Here we can see the extreme delicacy for Aquinas of balancing claims that personal inspiration and the gifts of grace which derive from the sacraments are the direct gift of the Spirit (and so in some sense outside the control of the church) with claims that it is the church through its ministries which dispenses such gifts.



Galatians :–

Aquinas affirms both that the gifts of grace and charity and the infused habits are direct gifts of the Spirit to the individual, and that it is the Spirit who is actively at work – as cause – in the sacraments, while acknowledging that there is also a sense in which it is the church’s ministers who give the Spirit through the sacraments. There is clearly here the potential for conflict between those who claim to act on the basis of individual charisms and those who represent the authority of the church, conflict which will occur with considerable vigour in the following centuries.

Luther Such questions about the nature and extent of the authority both of the official hierarchy of the church and of prophets and preachers weigh heavily with Luther in the s. He is confronted with the claims not only of Rome but also of the Anabaptists. This may account for the outburst in Luther’s comments on :: who hath bewitched you? Luther compares the spiritual errors of the Anabaptists, of Müntzer and of Zwingli(!), to the behaviour of parents deluded by the devil into believing that their daughter had been turned into a cow. St Macarius, so Luther, because he had spiritual eyes, was able to see not a cow but a virgin, and prayed for the parents that their eyes might be opened, as indeed they were. Similarly, says Luther, the enthusiasts are so bewitched by the devil that they ‘embrace lies, errors and horrible darkness as the most certain truth and the clearest light’ (Luther : ; LW .). Indeed, such is the power of bewitching ‘that it is impossible that those who are bewitched in spirit should deliver themselves by their own strength, unless they are delivered by those whose minds are not ensnared by this sorcery’ (Luther : ; LW .). Thus, for Luther, Paul in this passage is excusing the Galatians; it is the devil, sending the teachers among them, who had bewitched them. It is only through Paul’s labours of writing and preaching, seeking ‘to uncharm the sorcery wherewith the false apostles have bewitched you, and to set at liberty those who are snared therewith’ (Luther : ; LW .), that they may be freed. Even though Christ had been vividly presented to them as in a painting, they have now crucified him, distorting the true teaching of the gospel, presenting him no longer as mediator and saviour but as a severe judge. It is clearly tempting for Luther to counter opponents who claim to speak with the authority of the Spirit by accusing them of being possessed by false spirits. Luther turns from Paul’s rebuke to the Galatians to the arguments of the chapter. When Paul speaks of the Law, he refers not just to the ceremonial law but to the whole law. It was to those who had not known that law that, ‘at the only preaching of Peter and Paul, the Holy Ghost came upon those which heard

Galatians :–



the Word, through whom also they received diverse gifts, so that they spake with new tongues, etc.’ (appealing like Aquinas to Acts :; Luther : ; LW .). Acts indeed teaches only that the Holy Spirit ‘is not given by the law but by the hearing of the gospel’ (Luther : ; LW .). And this is supported by Christian experience. For there are many ‘in the Papacy’ who, despite all their efforts and good works, could ‘never attain to a quiet conscience, and peace in Christ’, but who now, through the teaching of the gospel that it is not works of the Law but faith which justifies, achieve ‘a most certain knowledge and understanding, a most joyful conscience, and a true judgement of every kind of life, and of all things whatsoever’ (Luther : ; LW .). What such people experience is not miracles or speaking with tongues, but ‘the testimony of the Spirit in their hearts’ (Luther : ; LW .), which, for Luther, clearly outweighs all the authority of the church and its ministries. What is important here for Luther is not, as with Aquinas, to distinguish different manners of the giving of the Spirit, each with its different kind of authority; for Luther it is, rather, the proper reception of the Word which is crucial. The problem here is that the phrase ‘hearing of faith’ can refer either to that which is heard by believers, i.e. the gospel, or to the faith which receives the gospel message. For Luther it is clearly the former which is implied in the contrast with ‘works of the law’. He distinguishes the word of faith from the hearing of faith: ‘that is, such a word as thou hearing dost believe, so that the word be not only my voice, but is heard of thee, and entereth into thy heart, and is believed of thee: then it is truly and indeed the hearing of faith through the which thou receivest the Holy Ghost; which after thou hast once received, thou shalt also mortify thy flesh’ (Luther : ; LW .). For the flesh constantly works against the hearing of faith, and therefore the faithful must always be on their guard. When Paul speaks of the Galatians ‘ending in the flesh’, he refers not just to lust and beastly passions, but to ‘the very righteousness and wisdom of the flesh, and the judgment of reason, which seeketh to be justified by the law’ (Luther : ; LW .). By contrast, the virtues, the works which the Spirit bestows on the faithful are ‘faith, hope, love, patience, etc.’. The Galatians had already experienced such change in their lives, as Paul testifies in chapter ; how could they then abandon it? It is the same story as with Luther and the fantastic spirits (‘a sort of light and brainsick heads’; : ; LW . ) who have destroyed all that he had planted, all of which is the work of the devil, ‘working in his members contrary works (virtutes) which wholly fight against the works virtutibus of the Holy Spirit’ (Luther : ; LW .). Luther is here playing on the Vulgate translation with its unclassical use of virtus to render the Greek dunamis. The ‘works of power’, miracles, which the Spirit effects in the Galatians are the Christian virtues, the fruit of the Spirit which comes from true hearing, interiorizing of the apostolic preaching. Luther appeals to the evidence of such powers/virtues to justify his



Galatians :–

claims to be preaching the truth. ‘[T]he righteousness of the heart is ignorant of all laws, not only of the Pope, but even of Moses also, since true righteousness cometh not of works of law, but of the hearing of faith, which is followed by the virtues and fruits of the Spirit’ (Luther : ; LW .). In this way, Luther stands, as so often, firmly in the tradition of Augustine, who, as we saw, emphasized the Spirit’s working in pouring the love of God into the believer’s heart rather than the Spirit’s working of miracles. With careful attention to the text, Luther has developed Augustine’s understanding by reading Paul’s contrast between Spirit and flesh in v.  in terms of his distinction in v.  between works of the Law and the hearing of faith. The crucial work of the Spirit is to calm the troubled conscience, liberating those who receive the gospel message of forgiveness from fear and so enabling them to bear the fruit of the Spirit.

Calvin With characteristic brevity, Calvin covers the ground. Paul’s ‘outburst of passion’ is understandable in the circumstances: who would not be indignant on hearing that ‘the Son of God, with all his blessings is rejected and that His death is esteemed as nothing’. He does not think that Paul’s reproach refers to the national characteristics of the Galatians; rather, it is as if they had been bewitched (‘it is akin to the supernatural’; Calvin : ). The view that the Galatians had crucified the Lord afresh and made a mockery of him is strained: rather, Paul has painted a vivid picture of Christ. Like Chrysostom, Calvin sees Paul here as bringing further arguments, rather than only now beginning to argue his case. In the first place, it is an argument based on the experience of the Galatians. When they first heard the gospel (taking ‘hearing of faith’ as referring to that which is heard, i.e. the gospel, contra Luther), they received the Spirit. This refers, so Calvin, to the grace of regeneration which is common to all believers (though he has no objections to its being taken as referring to the special gifts which accompanied the preaching of the gospel at that time). ‘Flesh’ refers either to ‘outward and fading things, like ceremonies (particularly when they are separated from Christ), or dead and weak doctrine’ (Calvin : ). Calvin sees a further argument in v. , from the past sufferings of the Galatians, and again in v. , where Paul speaks not of ‘the grace of regeneration but of the other gifts of the Spirit’. Calvin’s identification of the work of the Spirit in v.  with the grace of regeneration is of considerable import: there are identifiable aspects of Christian experience which can provide proof of the reality of the Spirit in their lives and which should be the precursors of spiritual growth and sanctification. This contrasts with Luther’s equation of the work of the Spirit with the production of the virtues, and paves the way for

Galatians :–



Plate  Paul preaching to the Galatians, medieval manuscript. Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Rothschild , folio v.

a more systematic distinction between regeneration and sanctification in the later Calvinist theologians. The primary evidence of the power of the gospel lies in the regeneration of believers, and this in turn is closely linked with the power of Paul’s preaching. What is needed is preaching that is not only rhetorically skilled but ‘which penetrates into consciences, so that men may see Christ crucified and that his blood may flow’ (Calvin : ). As the image of Christ on the cross comes to life in preaching, those who hear the word are confronted with their sins and receive the gift of new life. Thus, whereas Luther stresses the faithful hearing of the word, Calvin lays emphasis on the power of the preaching itself, its rhetoric and vivid depiction of Christ’s death. Where there is preaching of this quality in the church, ‘[w]hen she has such painters as these she no longer needs wood and stone, that is, dead images, she no longer requires any pictures’ (Calvin : ). The effect of such sentiments is clearly to be seen in the destruction of images in European churches of the period.

Parenthetical note on witchcraft Characteristically, Perkins treats Paul’s metaphors as warrants for belief in the realities to which they refer. ‘Here Paul takes it for a confessed truth, that there



Galatians :–

is witchcraft, and witches.’ He provides a definition: ‘It is a Satanicall operation, whereby the senses of men are deluded’, and some examples, including: ‘[t]here is a disease called Lycanthropia, in which, the braine being distempered, men thinke themselves to be wolves, and carrie themselves as wolves.’ Those who practice witchcraft are in league with the devil and ‘use charmes, imprecations, curses, praiers, superstitious invocations, according to his appointment, and other Satanicall ceremonies’ (Perkins : –). Perkins is here following in the tradition of medieval discussions of this phrase. Aquinas (: –; : –) invokes Aristotle against Avicenna: ‘because ostinate and hardened in evil, their sense appetite is affected by the vigor of their apprehension; as a result, as has been said, the infection moves from the veins to the eyes and thence to the object upon which they look. Accordingly, because the flesh of children is soft, it is influenced and charmed by their hostile glance.’ In this way, in both Catholic and Protestant Europe, apostolic support was provided for the hunting down of ‘witches’. It is this text which Thomas Hardy chooses for the sermon which Alec D’Urber ville is preaching when he and Tess meet for the first time after his seduction of her four years previously. His ‘rhapsodic’ discourse in the sermon she overhears relates his conversion from rake to Methodist preacher and is conveyed only in bare outline. His renewed encounter with Tess serves to bring out the tension which he feels between his past self and his new persona and shows him still to be caught in the ‘deadly war between the spirit and the flesh’ (Hardy : ix; for the sermon see –). The Pauline text thus provides a powerful metaphor for the ambiguous relationship between Alec and Tess, and the unsettling power which she exerts over him, her ability to delude him. Lightfoot draws attention to the two ideas involved in the word baskainein, ‘to bewitch’, ‘to put the evil eye on someone’: () the baleful influence on the recipient and () the envious spirit of the agent. In this case the first sense is primary. In popular belief the evil eye’s power to delude the victim worked through the eyes of the one bewitched. ‘To let the eye rest on the sorcerer therefore was to yield to the fascination.’ Paul alludes to this when he writes ‘before whose eyes Jesus Christ was placarded’. Lightfoot comments: ‘This placard ought to have kept their eyes from wandering, and so to have acted as charm against all Judaic sorceries’ (Lightfoot : –).

Perkins Perkins’s commentary also develops and modifies Calvin’s reading. He expands on the nature of the preaching of the cross which is referred to in Paul’s phrase ‘to whom Jesus Christ was displayed’. How do people ‘hear by faith’? The min-

Galatians :–



istry of the Word must be ‘plaine, perspicuous, and evident, as if the doctrine were pictured, and painted out before the eyes of men’. It must also be ‘powerfull and lively in operation, and as it were crucifying Christ within us, and causing us to feel the vertue of his passion’ (Perkins : ). This makes possible the contemplation of Christ which Perkins describes with great tenderness: First, by beholding Christ crucified, we see our miserie and wickednesse. For our sinnes are the swords and speares which have crucified him. Zach. .. Secondly, this sight brings us true and lively comfort: for beholding Christ crucified, we see Paradise as it were in the midst of hell: we see the handwriting against us, cancelled, Coloss. .. We see the remission of our sinnes, written with the heart blood of Christ, and sealed with the same. Thirdly, this sight of Christ makes a universall change of us. The Camelion takes to it the colours of the things which it seeth, and are neere unto it: and the beleeving heart takes to it the disposition, and minde that was in Christ crucified, by viewing, and beholding of Christ. This sight makes us mourne and bleede in our hearts for our offences, when wee consider, that Christ was crucified for them: and it makes us love Christ, when we consider the love of God in Christ crucified. (Perkins : )

In the light of this strongly contemplative element in Perkins’s piety, it is then somewhat surprising to find him nonetheless roundly condemning the carved and painted images of the papists: ‘we utterly detest them, as Idols’. The only appropriate Christian images are ‘Sermons of Christ, and the right administration of the sacraments’, for in these there is as lively a representation of the passion of Christ ‘as if Christ were yet in crucifying, and as though his blood were now distilling from his hands, and sides’(Perkins : ). It is not difficult to see how this tradition is continued in devotional literature of all kinds, not least in the hymnody of Isaac Watts, where theological interpretation and word-painting are wonderfully intertwined: See from his head, his hands, his feet, Sorrow and love flow mingled down; Did e’er such love and sorrow meet, Or thorns compose so rich a crown? His dying crimson, like a robe Spreads o’er his body on the Tree; Then am I dead to all the globe, And all the globe is dead to me. Were the whole realm of nature mine, That were a present far too small; Love so amazing, so divine, Demands my soul, my life, my all. (EH 107)

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Galatians :–

Perkins also considers ‘what is the scope of our hearing and teaching’. Here he is more concerned with distinguishing the spirit of true reformed religion from that of Catholicism than in clarifying the debates about the nature of the Spirit’s operations and gifts, which Luther and Calvin had opened up. His allegiance is to Calvin. The certen marke of true religion . . . is that the preaching therof confers the spirit of adoption. This doth not the pretended Catholick Religion of the Papists: it doth not conferre unto men the spirit to assure them that they are the children of God; because it teacheth that we are to be in suspence of our salvation. . . . [B]y teaching humane satisfactions, and merits, it ministreth the spirit of pride and presumption, as also the spirit of crueltie, and not of meekenesse: for they of that religion, commonly delight in blood: and there have bin no warres, or seditions, or rebellions in Europe, for many ages, but they of the Romish religion, have bin at one end of them. . . . True godlinesse and Religion stands in the spirit, that is, in the grace of the heart, or in the exercises of the inner man. (Perkins : )

It is not in outward observances of religion, church-going and the reception of the sacraments, that the ‘power and life’ of a religion lies. ‘Thou praiest in the church: but thou maist deceive the world in this. Tell me dost thou pray at home? Dost thou pray in thine owne heart unto God, by the spirit of praier? Then thou praiest indeede’ (Perkins : ). There is an interesting tension here between Perkins’s emphasis on God’s grace in the adoption of the believers, as opposed to Catholics’ concern that faith be accompanied by good works as also necessary for salvation, and the related emphasis on the need for believers to do what they ought: ‘The Gospel ministreth the spirit. For it showes us what we are to doe: and withall the spirit is given, to make us doe that which we are injoyned in the Gospel’ (Perkins : ).

Hilgenfeld For Hilgenfeld, chapters  and  constitute the second, dogmatic part of the Epistle. Here Paul addresses the central question of the distinction between the religion of faith and of the Law. The divine power which was alive in Christianity was for Paul the Spirit of God which every Christian received. [This] divine principle of life which was communicated to human nature expresses itself not only in the immanent indwelling, enlightenment and sanctification of human nature (Gal :f.,  Cor :f., Rom :), so that it may achieve the highest knowledge and love of God; the divine Spirit also enters into a transcendent relationship to the human personality over which it rules, it associates itself

Galatians :–



with the purely human as a higher self-consciousness and capability (cf. Gal :, Rom :, ). (Hilgenfeld : )

This relationship is the ground of the extraordinary phenomena which are associated with the gospel and which Paul names as signs of the apostle, and which Paul assumes in v.  to be present in Galatia. This in turn is a strong proof that ‘the highest form of spiritual life in Christianity, the highest form of communion with God, depends on the acceptance of faith alone, quite apart from any works of the law’. Therefore, to turn to a fleshly mode of existence would indeed have appeared to be folly to the apostle. Not that the Law as such was fleshly, or that it contained fleshly commands; rather, it was because it ‘expressed God’s will only in relation to fleshly human weakness, in so far as it had not yet been overcome and transcended (Gal :)’ (Hilgenfeld : –). Whereas Baur saw in Christianity the birth of a new universal spiritual self-consciousness which transcended the particularity of Judaism and so ushered in a new era in the history of religion, Hilgenfeld here takes that account of the difference between Christianity and Judaism in a rather different direction. For him, Judaism was the religion of those who had not yet, unlike Christians, overcome and transcended the weakness of the flesh (Rom :). In this way the Galatians’ turning to Judaism ‘was indeed properly a descent from the religion of spirit to fleshly externality and weakness’ (Hilgenfeld : ).

Bultmann and after Bultmann’s theology is in a significant sense a reaction to the Idealist theology of Baur and his followers. Influenced by the work of the history of religions school (Heitmüller and others, see Riches : –), he challenged Baur’s understanding of ‘spirit’ in Paul, seeing it as referring not to the new divine selfconsciousness in the believers but rather to ‘the miraculous divine power that stands in absolute contrast to all that is human. . . . The manifestations of the Spirit are that in a man’s conduct which is extraordinary, the powerfully mysterious and uncanny’ (Bultmann : ). The Hellenistic congregation drew on contemporary popular piety and belief in the miraculous; Paul partly took over and partly transcended this popular form of religion. In this passage Paul’s thinking is essentially in line with that of the Hellenistic church. The Spirit is given in baptism and manifests itself in miracles (Bultmann : ). However, for Paul pneuma also refers to the human spirit in its intentionality and striving as that spirit is (or is not) directed towards God (Bultmann : , referring to Rom :, ). We shall consider this more fully in relation to Galatians .



Galatians :–

Among more recent commentators, Dunn bases his reading on taking the phrase ‘receiving the Spirit’ as in Paul’s day ‘already more or less a technical term to speak of conversion and the beginning of Christian discipleship (Rom. viii.;  Cor. ii.;  Cor. xi.; Gal. iii.)’. This certainly narrows the meaning of the term, though it is clearly much less easy to spell out what might have been referred to by it. It was the ‘decisive and determinative element in the event or process of conversion and initiation’. It can be understood only in ‘experiential terms’, which means that it is not ‘a matter of purely rational conviction, or simply a deduction to be drawn from the fact of their having being baptized’. The coming of the Spirit was something that made an impact on the lives of those who received it, an impact at emotional as well as rational level. This would include, in at least some cases, dramatic and ecstatic experiences (as iii.  and  Cor. i.– imply; also consistently in Acts – ii., ; viii.–; x.–; xix.), in other cases deeply moving experiences (cf.. Rom. v.;  Thess. i.; see further on iv.), and Paul characteristically thought of the impact of the Spirit as an experience of liberation (Rom. viii.;  Cor. iii.) and as having immediate consequences for daily living (Rom. viii.ff.; Gal. v.ff.). (Dunn : )

Dunn urges this against those among contemporary Christians, not least ‘classical Pentacostals’, who see receiving the Spirit as a ‘second experience, subsequent to conversion’. The reception of the Spirit for Paul was ‘essentially the “beginning” of Christian discipleship’ (Dunn : ). It was also – and this is a recurrent theme of the ‘new perspective’ on Paul which Dunn advocates – a refusal of ‘the traditional practices which marked off Israel from the nations; how could they not see that they had been thus fully accepted by God and did not fall short in any degree in their standing before him?’ (Dunn : ).



Abraham as the Father of All Those Who Believe

The rest of the chapter consists of a series of arguments about the relative merits and demerits of the Law and faith as definitive of two different ways. These are all variously related to the figure of Abraham, someone to whom Paul’s opponents and indeed the Galatians may have well appealed in their debates with Paul: he was, after all, the first to be circumcised! There are a number of themes/ ideas which knit this chapter together and serve to explicate the meaning and relationship of law and faith, which was introduced in v.  and which in turns illuminate what Paul means by ‘receiving the Spirit’, to which Paul will return at the end of chapter . Of these, the principal are blessing and curse, promise

Galatians :–



and covenant/will, inheritance and descendants. Underlying them all, however, is the notion of Abraham’s faith which was counted to him as righteousness. What was the nature of this faith? In what sense was Abraham’s righteousness earned?

. Abraham as the Source of Blessing to Those that Believe Because Paul is here arguing that Christian faith has its roots in Scripture and in the Patriarch Abraham, specifically that it was the God of Abraham who made the promises which were redeemed through the action of Christ, this chapter must have raised particular problems for Marcion, who wished to drive a sharp wedge between the two covenants. Marcion, according to Jerome (PL ., following Origen; Harnack : *), solved the problem by omitting vv. –.

Patristic interpretation Theodore sets out the bare bones of Paul’s argument. Abraham, as Scripture says, attained righteousness by faith; and in order to correct those who lay claim to Abraham’s righteousness by virtue of their affinity with him, Paul makes it clear that it is those who are ‘of faith’ who are the true sons of Abraham and who in consequence share in his blessing. By ‘will be blessed in you’ the scripture means ‘will be blessed with you, and will share the blessing with you. They consider you the principator of this blessing.’ The Gentiles, however, who do not share kinship with him, can share in this blessing only if they believe in the God of the universe in like manner to him (Theodore : –). Paul, so Chrysostom explains, now adds an argument from the example of Abraham, a proof ‘from ancient narratives’, which takes up and answers points made by the Galatians, who ‘made great account of the Patriarch’. If Abraham was justified by faith, ‘what loss was it to him, not being under the Law?’ The ‘Law did not then exist, he says, neither does it now exist, any more than then’. Chrysostom, as we shall see, takes Paul’s statements about the temporary nature of the Law quite strictly. For Paul the blessing of righteousness given to Abraham in which believers share is dependent on faith rather than on obedience to laws which had not yet been promulgated. It is fascinating to see how carefully Chrysostom attempts to discern the inner logic of Paul’s argumentation and to second-guess the Galatians’ arguments which he is countering. Paul here, he suggests, addresses those who feared that to



Galatians :–

abandon the Law would be to become strangers to Abraham’s kin, and so to forfeit their inheritance (does Chrysostom think here of Jewish Christians in his environment who wished to return to the observance of the Law in order to share in the Abrahamic inheritance?) Paul counters their fears by offering scriptural proofs that, on the contrary, it is faith which is ‘especially concerned in connecting them with Abraham’. Thus ‘in thee all nations shall be blessed’ indicates that the Gentiles are brought into kinship with him through faith. Two further points concerned the Galatians, which Paul answers in this passage. First, they believed the Law to be older than faith, which is answered by the case of Abraham, whose justifying faith antedates the giving of the Law: ‘Faith was anterior to the Law.’ Second, they feared that if they did not obey all the Law they would be cursed (Deut :). This Paul turns around by showing that ‘those who relinquish the Law are not only not cursed, but blessed; and they who keep it, not only not blessed but cursed’, and this he does by proving that the Law ‘brought its adherents under a curse’ (NPNF .–). Augustine introduces a new element into the discussion by arguing that Abraham’s faith pre-dates his circumcision, which was received as ‘a seal of faith before all slavery to the law, which was given much later’ (Augustine : ).

Thomas Aquinas Such views seem to be addressed to a context in which the Christian church still saw itself as competing with the Jews for the allegiance of their members. Later commentators read the passage more obviously with contemporary, innerChristian debates in mind. This is apparent already in Aquinas, even clearer in the Reformation debates. Aquinas offers an interesting construal of the argument of the passage. It is, he says, an argument from authority and reason. By this he means that it is an argument in the form of a syllogism, where the major premiss is based on an authoritative statement of Scripture, that in Abraham’s seed all nations will be blessed. The minor premiss, which is also derived from Scripture, asserts that those who are justified by faith are sons of Abraham. The argument concludes that, therefore, those who are ‘of faith, i.e., who seek to be justified through faith, shall be blessed with faithful, i.e. with believing, Abraham’ (Aquinas : ; : ). In the course of this analysis of Paul’s argument, Aquinas elaborates on the notions of justice and faith, and, interestingly, on the notion of the ‘cause of justice’ (Aquinas : ; : ). ‘[J]ustice’, he says, ‘consists in paying a debt.’ Some things are owed to oneself, others to one’s neighbours, others to God. But what one owes to oneself and to one’s neighbour is on account of God; therefore the highest form of justice

Galatians :–



is to render to God what is God’s. Of all that is due from men and women to God, whether of the mind or the will or the body, the highest is what is owed by the mind or intellect. ‘Therefore the first element of justice in a man is that a man’s mind be subjected to God, and this is done by faith’ (Aquinas : ; : ). Thus, when Scripture speaks of Abraham’s faith, it means that ‘he submitted his mind to God by faith’. Aquinas’s comments on the next part of the Genesis citation ‘and it was reckoned to him for righteousness’ were to cause the Reformers even more concern. It means, he says, that ‘the act of faith and faith itself were for him [sc. Abraham] as for everyone else, the sufficient cause of justice (causa iustitiae).’ Faith ‘is reputed to him unto justice by men exteriorly, but interiorly it is wrought by God, Who justifies them that have the faith. This he does by remitting their sins through charity working in them (charitatem operantem)’ (Aquinas : ; : ). Clearly, to speak of faith as the ‘cause of righteousness’ comes close to seeing it as itself a kind of work; just as to distinguish the exterior imputation of righteousness by men and women from God’s interior working of righteousness through the operation of charity, as God remits people their sins, effectively dismisses the notion of imputed righteousness from the Christian doctrine of grace. The Reformers would see in such a statement a denial of the sufficiency of faith for justification, which Aquinas had affirmed in the previous clause.

Luther Luther’s reading of this passage is shot through with striking contrasts and paradoxes: Abraham’s faith in God is contrasted with the notions of God that reason produces. Abraham’s faith creates divinity in us; yet faith is only the first-fruits of our righteousness, and therefore God imputes righteousness to us to make good the deficiency. Abraham the begetter is distinguished from Abraham the believer. The working Abraham is again distinguished from the believing Abraham. Such distinctions form part of Luther’s armoury as he struggles to understand how Paul is claiming the figure of Abraham and his faith for his gospel over against his opponents, more immediately as he (Luther) struggles to see how, in the face of Catholic and Anabaptist challenges, he will claim Abraham and his faith for his own understanding of faith and justice/justification. His treatment is driven by his understanding of faith, which is ‘an almighty thing’, whose power is ‘infinite and inestimable’. To believe is to give God glory, to ‘count him true, wise, righteous, merciful, almighty: briefly, to acknowledge him to be the author and giver of all goodness’. It is, that is to say, a conception of faith, where the intellect has indeed its place, where God ‘has his full and



Galatians :–

perfect divinity’, but where acknowledgement of God’s goodness and sovereignty over all human life, no matter what the appearances, is central. The seat of belief is in the heart, not the reason. Such faith ‘maketh us divine people, and (as a man would say) it is the creator of divinity, not in the substance of God, but in us’ (Luther : ; LW .). In this sense, Abraham’s faith, in which believers share, is itself the blessing. Here is the root of later debates about fiducialism, the charge that Protestant views of faith are anti-intellectual, even if such a charge hardly does justice to the complexity of Luther’s thought. ‘[W]ith faith’, says Luther, ‘always must be joined a certain assurance (fiducia) of God’s mercy.’ But he adds: ‘Now this assurance comprehendeth a faithful trust (fidem) of remission of sins for Christ’s sake’ (Luther : ; LW  omits). In what sense, then, is the one who believes in this sense righteous, just? In terms of the jurists’ definition of justice as rendering to everyone his dues (cf. Aquinas above) the believer is just because he gives God that which is due to him. Such faith believes, in the face of human reason, what God says. Abraham believed God that Sarah would bear a child, though past the age of child-bearing. This is not the faith of the ‘justiciaries’; they do many things, like fasting, laying crosses on themselves, thinking thereby to appease the wrath of God. But for that reason, they do not give God the glory, that is ‘they do not judge him to be merciful, true, and keeping promises, etc., but to be an angry judge, which must be pacified by their works’ (Luther : ; LW .). However, while faith gives God the glory and creates divinity within the believer, it does not of itself suffice. It is only the first-fruits of the righteousness which the believer will ultimately experience. In the interim, God imputes righteousness to the believer, who is imperfect. ‘Wherefore faith beginneth righteousness, but imputation maketh it perfect unto the day of Christ’ (Luther : ; LW .). In this sense the ‘Christian is both righteous and a sinner (simul iustus et peccator), holy and profane, an enemy of God and yet a child of God’ (Luther : ; LW .). The sin is not laid to the Christian’s ‘charge (non imputatur), but is pardoned for Christ’s sake in whom thou believest, who is perfectly just; whose righteousness is thy righteousness, and thy sin is his sin’ (Luther : ; LW .). Luther had earlier set out this idea in the image of the bride of Christ in The Freedom of a Christian: Christ is full of grace, life, and salvation. The soul is full of sins, death, and damnation. Now let faith come between them and sins, death, and damnation will be Christ’s, while grace, life, and salvation will be the soul’s; for if Christ is a bridegroom, he must take upon himself the things which are his bride’s and bestow upon her the things that are his. (LW .)

Here Luther contrasts his position with that of the schoolmen who consider that ‘righteousness is a certain quality poured into the soul, and afterwards spread

Galatians :–



into all the parts of man’, i.e., scholastic doctrines of infused habits (cf. Aquinas’s discussion of the gifts of the Spirit above). Righteousness, says Luther here, is not in us formally (formaliter, shaping and forming us), ‘but is without us in the grace of God only and in his imputation; and there is no essential substance of righteousness in us besides that weak faith or firstfruits of faith, whereby we have begun to apprehend Christ, and yet sin in the meantime remaineth verily in us’. But in expressing his views on such subjects, Luther adds a disclaimer: ‘The matter, as touching the words, is easy’ (Luther : ; LW . ). One may take a clear stand when it comes to formal definitions: grasping the substance of Paul’s thought requires metaphor and paradox. This being said, Luther needs to distinguish between two ways of looking at Abraham. Abraham is not only the champion of faith, the one who believes in God despite all evidence to the contrary, and who follows God’s command to kill his son, the very ground of his hope in God’s promise to him of a great nation; he is also the man of virtue and good works, the father of a great people. Gen : refers to a ‘corporal thing, namely the promise of posterity’ (Luther : ; LW .–). But, says Luther, Scripture also speaks of Abraham as the ‘father of many nations’ (Gen :; Rom :), so that Abraham is the father not of Jews only but also of Gentiles. He is the father of many nations ‘before God, where he believeth: not before the world, where he begetteth. For in the world he is a child of Adam, and a sinner, or (which is more) he is a worker of righteousness of the law, living after the rule of reason, that is, after the manner of men’ (Luther : –; LW :). So when Paul refers to Abraham as faithful Abraham, ‘he putteth a plain difference between Abraham and Abraham . . . As if he said: There is a working, and there is a believing Abraham . . . the world was promised to that Abraham which believed’, not to the one ‘which is a worker, is circumcised, and keepeth the law’ (Luther : –; LW .–).

Calvin For Calvin, faith is not ‘any kind of conviction which men may have of the truth of God’; rather, faith ‘has a relation and respect to such a Word of God as may enable men to rest and trust in God’ (Calvin : –). Luther’s polemic against reason falls away: faith is assent to the truth about God, where such assent is given to the Word of God, and the confirmation of its truth lies in the assurance which it brings: the ‘rest and trust in God’. This latter emphasis is certainly present in Luther, but his sharp polemic against reason leads him to emphasize the paradoxical (credo quia absurdum) element of faith. Like Luther, Calvin takes righteousness in scholastic terms as that which is due to others,



Galatians :–

and he insists that men and women have nothing which would merit God’s gift to them of righteousness; therefore he must impute it to them on the basis of their faith. Against Aquinas, he insists that faith can be spoken of as the cause of our justification only in an attenuated sense. It is the instrumental, not the principal, cause, indicating only ‘the way in which men arrive at true righteousness. For this righteousness is not a quality inherent in men but the pure gift of God and is possessed by faith only. And that not even as a reward justly due to faith, but because we receive by faith what God freely gives . . . those who are righteous by faith are righteous outside themselves [echoing Luther], that is, in Christ’ (Calvin : –). Calvin, however, distances himself from Luther’s talk of faith as the first-fruits of the life of perfection which will be perfected only in the heavenly life, while meanwhile the final righteousness is imputed to the believer, not yet imparted; where the Christian is constantly falling back into his/her old ways, and where the new mode of existence coexists with the old, which often threatens to overwhelm it. Calvin rejects this schema, fearful, it would seem, that it might lead back into seeing faith as in some sense a work which contributes, at least in part, to the believer’s justification. Hence his emphasis that justification is purely imputed, which contrasts both with Luther’s more partial view and with Aquinas’s affirmation that imputation of righteousness is merely the external act of men as opposed to the internal gift of righteousness by God. Again, for Calvin, those who are children of Abraham by faith are such not simply by virtue of believing in the paradoxical (contrary to reason, as Luther asserts) power of God, any more than Abraham was justified ‘merely because he believed that God would multiply his seed’. Rather, they are children of Abraham because, like him, they embrace the grace of God, ‘trusting to the promised Mediator’ ( Cor :). To say that all must be blessed like Abraham, means that his faith, in this particular respect, is the ‘common model, even the rule . . . for all’. But whereas for Luther, faith was, in an important sense, itself the blessing which believers share with Abraham, Calvin is clear that the blessing here means ‘adoption into the inheritance of eternal life’, and that faith is a condition of receiving that inheritance: ‘there is no place in the Church for any man who is not a son of Abraham’ (Calvin : –).

Perkins This section, Perkins explains, presents a further argument for Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith. It argues that the children of Abraham are justified, as was he, by ‘justice imputed, and apprehended by faith’, but leaves unexpressed the conclusion, which is that they are the true children of Abraham, in respect

Galatians :–



of faith (Perkins : ). Perkins’s exposition takes up many of the themes raised by Aquinas, Luther and Calvin. Faith is understood here as part of an ongoing exchange between Abraham and God: Abraham looks first to God for protection, but then further for posterity, and God in every case responds with his assurances and promises. ‘As God renewes and inlarges his promise to Abraham, so Abraham renewes his faith’; so too, we are ‘to renew our faith, specially in the time of feare, and danger’. What such a process of interchange reveals is the true ‘object, or matter’ of Abraham’s faith. It is true that he was concerned with ‘the multiplication of his posteritie’, but this should not be contrasted (as in Luther’s treatment) with his true faith, a ‘working’ with a ‘believing’ Abraham. ‘The promise of the multiplication of his seed, was a dependant of a more principall promise, I am thy God all-sufficient, Gene. ..’ It was also a means ‘to effect the incarnation of the Sonne of God’. And what was the ‘propertie’ of Abraham’s faith? It was a faith against hope: so, too, we ‘must in all our temptations, miseries, infirmities, against reason, sense, and feeling, beleeve the promise of remission of sinnes, and life everlasting’. What, then, is the ‘effect and fruite’ of Abraham’s faith? The question comes close to Aquinas’s talk of faith as the ‘cause of righteousness’, but, unsurprisingly, the answers are quite different. All turns on the meaning of imputation in v. . The word is ‘borrowed from merchants: and it signifies to reckon, or to keepe a reckoning of expences and receits’. Here it is applied to judgement, where God adjudges ‘unto men for their sinnes, either pardon, or punishment’, clearly in this case, pardon. This imputation can be either legal, where God ‘adjudgeth the reward to him that fulfilleth the law’, or evangelical, ‘when God accepts the satisfaction of Christ our surety as a paiment for our sinnes’, referring to its use in Romans  (Perkins : ). Thus imputation is made fundamental to the Christian experience of salvation and pardon. The question, however, is what is imputed? Does this cover all aspects of the Christian’s new life? In what sense is faith itself the new life itself? There is a sensitive point at issue here: does one consider faith as the human side of the new relationship which is established in Christ, analogous to the dialogical relationship between God and Abraham, which Perkins had outlined above? Or is faith merely the means by which the believer lays hold of Christ’s benefits, and therefore to be sharply distinguished from salvation, to which it is merely the means? Perkins takes the instrumental view. Faith as such is imperfect, ‘and consequently cannot be imputed to us for our justification’. It is, rather, the ‘hand holding and receiving Christ’. So when it is said that Abraham’s faith was imputed to him for righteousness, it is the object of his believing, that is spoken of, not his faith as such. This would explain why Perkins is keen to attribute to Abraham a belief in the incarnation, though this represents a considerable departure in relation to the other interpreters we have been considering.



Galatians :–

All this leads to a clear statement of the Christian’s duty consequent upon this understanding of faith: it is to ‘come into the presence of God, plead guiltie, and acknowledge our selves to be as bankrupts, and intreat him to graunt pardon to us, and to accept the satisfaction of Christ for us: then will God not impute our sinnes, but the obedience of Christ for our justification: and accept him as our suretie in life and death’. However simple this may sound, the matter is further complicated in the following discussion of the notion of the children of Abraham: Christian believers are Abraham’s children, not merely by imitation of Abraham’s faith but also by ‘a kind of spirituall generation. For Abraham by beleeving the promise of a seed did after a sort beget them’ (Perkins : ). The sense seems to be that if Abraham had not believed, then the promise would never have been made, and God’s act of grace would not have been performed. For ‘[i]ndeed properly the promise and election of God makes them children: and Abraham by his faith beleeving the foresaid promise, receives them of God as his children’ (cf. children of promise, Rom :). Just as it had seemed that there was security in putting out one’s hand and believing in Christ’s obedience, Perkins adds that, because our status as children of Abraham rests properly on God’s election that ‘our profession of Abraham’s faith, partly in teaching, partly in hearing, and in the use of the Sacraments is not sufficient to proove us the children of Abraham’ (Perkins : –). What, then, is to be done? ‘[W]e must labour to be indeed and in truth of the faith of Abraham, and to walke in the steppes of his faith.’ But it is not at all clear how fuller knowledge of the promises, belief in the power of the promises and ‘obey[ing] God in all things, shutting our eyes, and suffering ourselves (as it were) to be led blindfold, by the word of God’ could ever lead to assurance that one was oneself, as opposed to all the others who were going through these spiritual exercises, one of the elect. There is some indication here as to what drives Perkins to make such assertions: the problem is that ‘[f]aith was never more professed, yet there was never lesse true faith. For the common faith of men, is a false faith’ (Perkins : ). Perkins can quite properly appeal to those elements in the text which support such a reading, the emphasis on God’s promise which points forward to the new dispensation in Christ, to Scripture’s foreknowledge of God’s future justification of the Gentiles. These are elements which have an understandable place in Paul’s arguments against the Judaizers in his attempts to prove that the new way based on faith is not something wholly unrelated to God’s ways with Israel. Such motifs, however, gain an altogether more threatening character when they are expounded in the context of a state religion anxious about its ability to provide the necessary disciplinary rigour to enable the proper functioning of the new Protestant state. The profound contradictions of this position are nowhere more touchingly brought out than in Bunyan’s account of his own way out of such puritanical

Galatians :–



coils in Grace Abounding, from which he is delivered by his encounter with Luther’s ‘comment on the Galathians, so old that it was ready to fall piece from piece, if I did but turn it over’ (Bunyan : –; see above, p. ).

Baur For Baur, the question of whether the faith which justifies has its own intrinsic value or virtue (as opposed to being merely instrumental in laying hold of Christ’s righteousness) is answered firmly in the affirmative: the new life of faith is a life where the believer participates in the divine Spirit. What, then, of the relation between Abraham’s faith, which might seem to be representative of an older, particularistic religious self-consciousness and the new universalism of Christianity? Baur’s answer is characteristically dialectical. In one sense Judaism is opposed to Christianity as a religion of law, contrasted with a religion of grace. But Judaism ‘is further the subjective mediation of this opposition; for the knowledge of sin is only possible through the law’ (Baur : ). This both distinguishes Judaism from paganism and marks out Judaism as the way which leads to the Christian religion of grace. Through the Law comes consciousness of sin, ‘which is the indispensable and only preparation for the reception of grace’. More than this, the Old and New Testaments are related to each other ‘as promise and fulfilment; the Old Testament contains ideally what is realized in Christianity’. Abraham’s faith and the justifying faith of the Christian are ‘essentially the same thing’. Judaism is not adequately described as simply a particular religion, to be contrasted with the universality of Christianity. For ‘it rests on a foundation from which it looks beyond everything particular, and contains the same universality that is characteristic of Christianity’ (Baur : ). Romans  and Galatians  show that the same ‘imputation of faith as righteousness’ was in Abraham’s faith in the divine promise as in the ‘Christian idea of justification’ (Baur : ). Thus Christian justification by faith, as opposed to by works of the Law, far ‘from being an encroachment on the religion of the Old Testament . . . merely carries out what the Old Testament itself declares with regard to the law; it fulfils a prophecy which was given before the law, . . . the superiority of which to the law cannot possibly be questioned’ (Baur : ).

Lightfoot Like Baur, Lightfoot takes faith to refer to the positive virtues in believers, their trustfulness and their trustworthiness. Characteristically, he tackles the



Galatians :–

topic philologically. In a note on the words denoting ‘faith’, he remarks that the Hebrew lacks a substantival form corresponding to the active or subjective sense, trustfulness, though this is expressed verbally in the Hiphil of ‘aman (Lightfoot : ). From this he concludes that ‘it appears that the term “Faith” can scarcely be said to occur at all in the Hebrew Scriptures of the Old Testament’. And he goes on: ‘It is indeed a characteristic token of the difference between the two covenants, that under the Law the “fear of the Lord” holds very much the same place as “faith in God,” “faith in Christ,” under the Gospel. Awe is the prominent idea in the earlier dispensation, trust in the later.’ However, he does qualify this position: ‘At the same time, though the word itself is not found in the Old Testament, the idea is not absent; for indeed a trust in the Infinite and Unseen, subordinating thereto all interests that are finite and transitory, is the very essence of the higher spiritual life’ (Lightfoot : ). In other respects, Lightfoot’s position contrasts interestingly with Baur’s. If for Baur, this is the occasion to reflect on the continuities between the Old Testament and Pauline Christianity, for Lightfoot it is an opportunity to compare and contrast Paul with his Jewish contemporaries. In an extended note on the faith of Abraham, he gives a historical treatment of Jewish readings of the faith of Abraham in the Second Temple period. He contrasts the individualistic readings of Philo with the more corporately minded interpretations of ‘Judaism proper’, the Judaism of the Rabbis. Over both, Paul stands supreme, sharing what is good about each and transcending their imperfections. Philo saw Abraham, the man of faith, only in terms of what he, Philo, could learn from him. ‘The promises made to him, the rich inheritance, the numerous progeny, had no fulfilment except in the growth of his own character. The Alexandrian Jew, like the heathen philosopher, was exclusive, isolated, selfish’ (Lightfoot : –). Thus the Old Testament idea of the covenant had no meaning for Philo, nor did he have any notion of a church. He could appreciate the ‘significance of Abraham’s faith, but Abraham’s seed was almost meaningless to him’. By contrast, ‘Judaism proper’ was strong where Alexandrian Judaism was weak, and weak where it was strong. It was intensely interested in the corporate life, but it identified this with the ‘rigorous observance of outward ordinances’ (Lightfoot : ). Paul, by contrast, shares the strengths of these two forms of Judaism. Like Philo and unlike ‘Judaism proper’, he conceives of faith not as tied to outward observances, but as a ‘spiritual state, a steadfast reliance on the unseen God’; unlike Philo, though like rabbinic Judaism, he ‘clung to the fulfilment of the promise, he cherished fondly the privileges of a son of Abraham. But to him the link of brotherhood was no longer the same blood’ (as with rabbinic Judaism) ‘but the same spirit: they only were Abraham’s sons who inherited Abraham’s faith’. Thus, like Philo, Paul ‘looked to the growth of the individual man’; like the Rabbis, he ‘recognized the claims of a society’. But Paul’s doctrine

Galatians :–



of faith ‘was a protest alike against the selfish, esoteric, individualizing spirit of the one, and the narrow, slavish formalism of the other’ (Lightfoot : ). Lightfoot’s romanticism, his fascination with national and regional characteristics, means that he does not simply deal in blanket vilification of the ‘Jews’, but rather distinguishes Alexandrian from the Rabbinic Judaism of Babylon and Palestine. But he is still inclined to distinguish Alexandrian Judaism from ‘Judaism proper’ and to revert to stereotypical definitions of the latter: ‘narrow, slavish formalism’. There is a strange gulf between the scholarly, philological work of the commentary on the Greek text of the epistle and the wilder flights of fantasy and prejudice in the extended notes. In concluding, Lightfoot turns to the question, advanced by Perkins, as to whether the Messiah can be said to be the object of Abraham’s faith. But while noting that Jn : may give some indication of this, he asserts firmly: ‘St. Paul makes no such application of Abraham’s example. He does not once allude to the Christ, as the object of the Patriarch’s faith’ (Lightfoot : ).

Twentieth-century readings For Bultmann, faith is ‘the attitude (Haltung) of man in which he receives the gift of “God’s righteousness” and in which the divine deed of salvation accomplishes itself within him’. It is ‘the condition for the receipt of “righteousness,” taking the place of “works,“ which in the Jewish view constitute that condition’. Paul gives this a characteristic stamp, understanding faith ‘primarily as obedience’ (Bultmann : ). This understanding of faith, for Paul, derives from the message which is accepted by believers. ‘[A]cknowledgement of the crucified Jesus as Lord demands of man the surrender of his previous understanding of himself, the reversal of the direction his will has previously had’ (Bultmann : ). Thus faith is not something of their own doing, which believers can boast about; nor is it a particular kind of experience or propensity of the soul: it is ‘the condition for receiving salvation’ (Bultmann : ). This latter point is reinforced by the fact that for Paul faith is confession: it is faith in God’s saving deed in Christ; faith comes from hearing the word (Gal :, ), and as such it ‘contains a knowing’ (Bultmann : ). This should not be understood, however, simply in objective terms as if the object of faith were some kind of historical report. ‘For the word is kerygma, personal address, demand, and promise; it is the very act of divine grace.’ In this sense faith is not simply a matter of pure receptivity. For the word which addresses the believer is a word which speaks to people and invites them to discover themselves anew in obedience to and acceptance of God’s grace. As such it brings hope: ‘“Faith” is no self-contained condition of man’s soul, but points toward the future: “he who



Galatians :–

by faith is righteous shall live” (Gal :; Rom :)’ (Bultmann : ). Above all, it establishes a new relationship between the believer and God, which is a present reality which opens up new possibilities of existence. As such, it is an eschatological reality, something which owes its existence to God’s speaking to those who are caught up in their own self-understanding and their attempts to control their own existence and releasing them from it. In this way Bultmann is true to Luther’s emphasis on the gift-character of the righteousness of God (righteousness, not of my own but from God, Phil :), at the same time as he seeks to explicate the existential outworkings of the believer’s acceptance of such a gift which is received through the hearing of faith (Gal :). This became a central theme for the circle around Bultmann in the post-war period, as is well illustrated by Gerhard Ebeling’s collection of essays, Word and Faith. Its primary concern, he writes, is to uphold the Reformation concentration on Word and faith as the cardinal principle of all theological reflection. And he quotes Luther’s remark in The Babylonian Captivity of the Church: ‘God never has dealt, and never does deal, with mankind at any time otherwise than by the word of promise. Neither can we, on our part, ever have to do with God otherwise than through faith in His word and promise’ (LW ., in Ebeling : V). These views, as we have seen (above, p. ) have been criticized by Sanders, not because they fail to give an adequate account of what Paul says about the hearing of faith: ‘the analysis of the existential aspects of faith as accepting the gratuity of salvation, in distinction to human self-assertion, whether in terms of wisdom or righteousness by the law, have never been more penetratingly described than by Bultmann’ (Sanders : ); but because of the way in which Bultmann turns all Paul’s mythological statements into ‘existential demands which require a decision and which call into question the believer’s self-understanding, thus opening the possibility of a new self-understanding’ (Sanders : ). Sanders’s point is not that accepting the truth of Paul’s statements about e.g. participation in the body of Christ does not have ‘existential significance’ and will result in a revised self-understanding. His point is rather that this seems to be the individual and internal consequence of Paul’s theology rather than the exhaustive interpretation of it. The Spirit which works miracles and produces charismata is not simply ‘the word of grace’. Being one body and one Spirit with Christ is not simply living out of a revised self-understanding, although that may also result. It seems to me best to understand Paul as saying what he meant and meaning what he said: Christians really are one body and Spirit with Christ, the form of the present world really is passing away, Christians really are being changed from one degree of glory to another, the end really will come and those who are in Christ will really be transformed. (Sanders : )

Galatians :–



But what is it to say that those who are in Christ will be really transformed? What meaning can we give to first-century mythological statements? How are we to assess the appropriateness of the readings which we have looked at from Aquinas, Luther and Calvin, or indeed from Pseudo-Dionysius or St John of the Cross? Sanders’s ‘confession’ that he does not have a new category of perception to propose other than ‘naive cosmic speculation and belief in magical transference on the one hand and a revised self-understanding on the other’ (Sanders : ) is an unashamed confession of his own ‘soft naturalism’, which has no room for Paul’s cosmological beliefs. It is also a refusal to engage with the long Christian tradition of attempting to say what is ‘really’ meant by Paul’s statements. Among his followers, Bultmann’s exclusive focus on the theological anthropological senses of Paul’s language of justification by faith provoked a variety of reactions, not least from Ernst Käsemann in his Commentary on Romans (Käsemann ), which is nicely caught in a letter from Käsemann to Bultmann written in : That God establishes his right over this earth is indeed something different from what you would call our new understanding of being, and is, as it seems to me, the subject which strangely unites the New Testament writings in all their diversity. You doubtless would only be able to call this message mythological. But the message stands and falls precisely with this mythological message, at least in my view. (Way : , n. , my transl.; Riches )

None has pursued these issues with greater tenacity than J. Louis Martyn, a close friend of Käsemann. He argues that Gal : sets out a basic antinomy that characterizes the new creation that Paul announces at the end of the letter, the antinomy between ‘human observance of the law’ and ‘the divine message that elicits faith’. By antinomies, Martyn means those defining – and contrasted – features which mark out a particular world, such as circumcision and uncircumcision, which defined the world in which Paul grew up, whereas the new world which Paul proclaims is defined differently, in terms of spirit and flesh, and, as here, of works of the law and the hearing of faith. That latter phrase, however, is ambiguous in the Greek. The noun akoē can mean either that which is heard or the act of hearing. Arguing for the former sense, Martyn paraphrases Paul’s rhetorical question as: Did you receive the Spirit by your act of being Law-observant or by the message enacted by God? (Martyn 1997b: 286–7)

This raises a further question: what is meant by the Greek phrase akoē pisteōs, ‘the message of faith’: is it the ‘message which consists in the gospel of faith’



Galatians :–

or the ‘message that elicits faith’? Arguing strongly for the latter sense, Martyn concludes: Paul does not at all focus his attention – and thus his theology – on alternative lines of human action, such as being observant of the Law

believing in Christ.

His focus lies on the apocalyptic event of God’s action in Christ and – to say the same thing in other words – on the faith-eliciting message in which Christ is proclaimed. . . . The generative context in which the Spirit fell upon the Galatians was not their act of commencing observance of the Law; it was God’s act in the revelatory proclamation of Jesus Christ suffering crucifixion, the act by which God kindled their faith. (Martyn b: –)

. The Curse of the Law and Its Removal by Christ to Make Way for the Blessing of Abraham Paul now moves to consider the position of the Law in relation to faith. If justification, as promised to Abraham at the beginning of the history of God’s dealings with his world, is by faith alone and not through works of the Law, then what of the Law? Verses – contrast the curse which falls on those who live by works of the Law with the blessing which is promised to those who share in Abraham’s faith. It does so by providing scriptural arguments for the inability of the Law to bring life, and gives Paul’s views on how Christ has freed people of faith from the curse of the Law, so that they may receive the promised blessing of the Spirit.

Marcion Marcion must clearly have found himself torn by what to leave in and what to leave out here. Paul’s language about the curse of the Law would have been grist to his mill, but his use of scriptural quotations to make his points would not. Harnack reconstructs Marcion’s text as follows: Learn that the just will live by faith. For as many as are under the law are under a curse; he who does such things will live by them. Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us. For it is written: Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree. Therefore we have received the blessing of the Spirit through faith. (Harnack : *–*)

Galatians :–



Commenting on v. , Jerome says that Marcion here ‘defames the creator as bloodthirsty, cruel and avenging, asserting that we are saved by Christ, who is the son of another, good God’ (Jerome, PL .). In this way he presents the Law and faith as two wholly opposed ways. Clearly this can be done only by omitting significant parts of Paul’s argument; on the other hand, those who accept Paul’s full text as authoritative have the difficult task of finding a coherent thread in his claims about the Law.

Chrysostom Paul, says Chrysostom, having proved that Abraham was justified not by the Law but rather by faith, for the Law had not then been given, now turns to deal with a possible objection. Maybe, it could be argued, faith justified before but not after the giving of the Law. Here he ‘proves more than they required: namely, not only that Faith was justifying [this, after the giving of the Law], but that the Law brought its adherents under a curse’. This Paul proves from the Law itself (citing Deut :), and then cites Hab : ‘which not only establishes the righteousness that is of Faith, but also that there is no salvation through the Law’ (NPNF .). But the text from Deuteronomy, as Chrysostom sees, throws up a further question. If Deut : says that everyone who does not observe all the Law is accursed, how do we know that this curse is not still in force, and that therefore even believers should strive to fulfil the Law? Paul replies that Christ has released those who believe from the curse of the Law. As Chrysostom reads this, the argument goes as follows. Christ has taken the curse which lies on all people on himself, and so freed all from it. This is a vicarious act, ‘like an innocent man’s undertaking to die for another sentenced to death’. This means that Christ was not himself subject to the curse but ‘receive[d] another instead of it’. This substitute curse was the curse referred to in Deut :, which refers to criminals who have been stoned and then displayed on a stake: their bodies are cursed and should not be allowed to pollute the land. Christ, though innocent of ‘the curse of transgression’, took this other curse upon himself ‘in order to remove that of others’. Thus the cross removes the curse, faith brings righteousness, and those who are righteous and united to Christ, receive the promised gift of the Spirit, for ‘the grace of the Spirit could not possibly descend on the graceless and offending’ (NPNF .). This is an interestingly different, if earlier, version of notions of substitutionary atonement, where Christ does not pay the penalty for sin but suffers the effects of another kind of curse altogether.



Galatians :–

Augustine Augustine takes the phrase ‘under the curse of the Law’ to indicate that those who live by the Law ‘live under fear’ and are not free. By contrast, the person who is justified before God, ‘worships God gratis, that is, neither out of a desire to obtain anything from God except God himself, nor out of a fear of losing anything except God himself ’. Augustine takes ‘law’ here to refer to ‘those people held in check by circumcision of the flesh and observances of this kind’ (Augustine : ). Life lived under these laws is concerned with material rewards and punishments, and the righteousness of such a life is ‘earthly and carnal’ (Augustine : , referring to Phil :); it is concerned with present, visible things, and not, as the spiritual life of faith, with the invisible: ‘For our only true happiness and perfection is in him, and since he is invisible to fleshly eyes, as long as we live in the flesh we worship in faith’ (referring back to Gal :). In this way, a life lived in obedience to circumcision and other such observances comes to represent more generally the carnal way of life, as opposed to the spiritual life which is concerned with the invisible (Augustine : ). Such a universalizing of life under the curse of the Law, seeing it as representing that from which – all – humanity needs to be rescued, might well seem to play straight into the hands of the Marcionites and Manichaeans, with their radical opposition between the God of the Old Testament and the God of Jesus Christ; Augustine attempts to avoid such implications by restricting the meaning of the Law in this context to the ceremonial laws, but this then puts additional pressure on him to explain the purpose of such laws, which for him are certainly uttered by the God of Jesus Christ. Such a universalizing of the notion of the curse of the Law enables Augustine to take Christ’s redemption of men and women from the curse of the Law in the widest possible sense to refer not only to liberation from the demands of the ceremonial law but also to redemption from mortality and sin and fear. Christ frees people from the demands of the ceremonial law and fear of its punishments by his example, e.g. in plucking grain on the sabbath and by his death which liberates all from sin and mortality. Attempting to reassure his readers that it is not strange or insulting that Christ should be called accursed, he argues that what hung on the tree was Christ’s ‘mortal aspect . . . that by dying he might overcome death’; it is ‘death [that] is cursed’. It was the ‘sin of the old humanity which the Lord took upon himself in the very mortality of the flesh for us’. By assuming all these things, he overcame them. Is it not wonderful, therefore, if he who overcame death by death and sin by sin and the serpent by the serpent [referring to Num : and Jn :], overcame the curse by the curse? . . . Thus, because Christ justifies those who believe in him not

Galatians :–



by works of the law but by faith, the fear inspired by the curse of the cross is taken away, and the love inspired by the blessing of Abraham (which he received for his example of faith) remains for the Gentiles. (Augustine : )

Thus, while the removal of the curse of the Law, is something which applies specifically to the Jews (the more so for Augustine, because he links it specifically to the ceremonial observances of the Law), the liberation of the cross is of far wider significance, liberating all from all aspects of this carnal existence. What, then, of the unity of God’s purposes, in the light of this overturning of (aspects, at least) of the Law? Paul uses a scriptural text, ‘cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree’ (a loose amalgam of : and Deut :), precisely to show the unity of God’s purpose in giving the Law and providing a way out of the curse which it brings, so that we might no longer be justified in fear by works of the law but by faith before God, which works not through fear but through love. For the Holy Spirit, speaking through Moses, provided for both in such a way that those who were not yet able to live by faith in invisible things might be restrained by fear of visible punishment, and Christ himself might break down that fear by taking himself the thing that was feared and, once the fear was taken away, bestow the gift of love. (Augustine : )

The phrase ‘those who were not yet able’ gives the clue to Augustine’s resolution of the dilemma: the Law has its place to play in the ‘education of the human race’.

Thomas Aquinas Paul, so Aquinas, having expounded the strength (virtutem) of faith, now turns to consider the shortcoming (defectum) of the Law. This immediately poses a problem for him, which dominates his exposition of this passage. If one were to take Paul’s words literally, ‘For all those who are of the works of the Law, are under a curse’, it would mean that the ‘ancient fathers’ were cursed, and this, as he expressly says, would play straight into the hands of the Manichees. In reply, he introduces a number of distinctions. In the first place, Paul does not say, ‘as many as observe the works of the Law’, because this is ‘false when applied to the time of the Law’. Rather, he says, ‘as many as are of the works of the Law’, which he takes to mean ‘trust in the works of the Law and believe that they are made just by them’. Such people are under a curse: namely, the curse of transgression. The curse, that is, is not the curse of the Law as such, for concupiscence does not come of the Law. What the Law brings is knowledge of sin; we are prone to



Galatians :–

sin because of concupiscence, which is awakened when it is forbidden by the Law. They are thus said to be under a curse, insofar as the Law brings knowledge of sin and offers no help against sin, ‘since they are powerless to escape it by those works’ (Aquinas : ; : ). How sensitive a point this is can be seen from the fact that Aquinas here rejects the Glossa (PL .D), which, following Augustine, argued that Paul was referring only to the ceremonial, not the moral law. This applies to the whole Law, he argues, for no one is justified by the Law. Works of the Law are not what make someone just, whether they be moral or ceremonial works; they are, rather, manifestations of the justice which a person has received. Men and women are justified only by the habit of faith informed by charity, and it is this which is the source of good works (Aquinas : ; : ). But then what of the problem of the ancient fathers, raised by the Manichees? In what sense did they observe the Law, rather than trust in it, thinking to be justified by it? The problem is exacerbated by Paul’s reference to Deut :, , ‘cursed is everyone who does not abide by everything that is written in the book of the Law, to do them’. Aquinas’s reply is not one of his most convincing: ‘[T]he holy patriarchs, although they were of the works of the Law, were nevertheless saved by faith in the one to come, by trusting in His grace and by fulfilling the Law at least spiritually’ (Aquinas : ; : ). Further, when he discusses v. , ‘the Law is not of faith’, he argues, following Augustine, that the commands of the Law were linked to earthly promises given to those who observed the Law carnally, whereas faith is concerned with invisible and eternal goods. There were, however, those who lived spiritually in the Law, not concerned, that is, with earthly goods, nor simply acting out of fear, but this came not from the Law but from ‘faith in a mediator’ (Aquinas : ; : ). Thus there is a certain continuity between the old and the new law, which can be compared as the works of nature and the works of the intellect are compared. But if the Law cannot save us from the curse of the Law, how can Christ? The curse of the Law is twofold: the curse of guilt and of punishment. Christ is made a curse in respect of guilt, not because he himself was guilty but ‘only according to the opinion of men and particularly the Jews who regarded him as a sinner’ (Jn :; Aquinas : ; : ). He was made a curse in respect of punishment, in that God wished him to suffer the penalty for our sins in order to liberate us from the curse of the Law (Aquinas : ; : ). And this liberation brings with it a hope which goes beyond the liberation from the curse itself: namely, that we will also receive the promise of the Spirit (for this is something which is to be given to the Gentiles who were not under the curse of the Law, but were to receive the blessing of Abraham, and is therefore distinct). This blessing comes in the form of the Spirit whom we receive as a guarantee and pledge of the eternal happiness which the Spirit promises. More-

Galatians :–



over, we receive the blessing of Abraham insofar as we are joined in the Spirit to Christ and so become the seed of Abraham and worthy of blessing. And this is through faith, ‘through which also we obtain an eternal inheritance’ (Aquinas : ; : ). As with Chrysostom, there is a hierarchy of saving works: the cross brings freedom from the curse of the Law only to those who were under the curse, i.e. not to the Gentiles (Aquinas : ; : ). Nevertheless, it is part of the fruit of Christ’s having been made a curse, that the blessing promised to Abraham should come upon the Gentiles, though how this should be seems simply unexplained. The blessing comes through the gift of the Spirit and through union with Christ: all this is part of the grace which is conferred by the Christ who has removed the curse of sin and so opened up the new life of faith in union with him and in the Spirit. In this way the effect of the cross is strikingly retrospective: what it clearly does is to remove the curse which hangs over those who were under the Law; it is much less clear how it bears on those who were not under the Law, who have faith and receive the gift of union with Christ and the presence and promises of the Spirit. What is clear is that the Gentiles themselves were not under the curse of the Law, though they could, perversely, put themselves under it.

Luther In striking contrast to Aquinas, but with clear parallels in Augustine, Luther argues forcibly that the curse of the Law is not just restricted to those who were actually Jews seeking to live in accordance with the Mosaic Law, but rather includes all. If the Law, which is given by God, subjects Jews to the curse, ‘much more shall the laws and traditions so do, which are devised by man’s reason’. Therefore, all nations are ‘accursed, and shall abide under the curse for ever, unless they are blessed in the faith of Abraham’ (Luther : ; LW .). This has two consequences. First, it means that Abrahamic faith (mediated through Christ alone, Luther will argue) is the universal cure for the ills of humankind. Second, in that he has characterized all laws and traditions as bringing a curse on those who observe them, Luther has laid himself open to the charge that he is seeking to undermine all civil government, a charge to which the popular uprisings at the time of the Reformation (the Peasants’ Revolt, the Münster Anabaptists) would lend considerable credence. He deals with the latter problem first. We must distinguish the righteousness of faith as clearly as possible from ‘the righteousness of the flesh, or civil righteousness. For we must note that Paul is here in hand, not with a matter of policy, but with a divine and spiritual matter, lest any mad brain should cavil,



Galatians :–

and say that he curseth and condemneth politic laws and civil magistrates.’ This opens the way within the Lutheran tradition for a sharp separation between the roles of church and state, which in turn allows for a too easy alliance between the two. The church can concern itself with spiritual matters relating to eternal life; the state with ‘civil laws, manners and matters political (which are the ordinances of God, and good things, and the Scripture elsewhere approveth and commendeth the same)’ (Luther : ; LW .). Taken to its extreme, this means that the church denies itself any kind of prophetic or critical role in relation to the policies of the state in return for its protection. The church’s role is to proclaim the gospel and to let its light shine before the world; it should not confuse civil justice and the righteousness of faith, but should encourage its members to obey the civil rulers. This undoubtedly emancipates the secular world from the tutelage of the church and gives a relative value to ‘corporal things’ as ‘the good creatures of God’. Marriage, family, goods, laws and ceremonies are ‘the temporal blessings belonging to this life’ which God confers on the just and the unjust alike (Luther : ; LW .–). But they are in no way to be confused with the spiritual blessings which Christ brings. When he comes to v.  Luther, with characteristic sharpness, puts his finger on the antinomy which Paul’s quotation of Deut : creates. On the one hand, Paul says: ‘Whoever shall do the works of the Law is accursed’; on the other, Moses says: ‘Whosoever shall not do the works of the Law, is accursed’ (Luther : ; LW .). Luther resolves this apparent contradiction, much like Aquinas, by identifying two different senses of ‘doing the Law’. There are doers of the Law who are ‘of the Law’ and would be justified by the Law. For Luther such people are ultimately idolators, for they seek to usurp the place of God, who alone can justify his people. In this they deny the text which runs through Luther’s discussion of the whole of this passage: ‘In thee shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.’ Only those who share the promise which is given to Abraham will be blessed, not those who seek to derive a blessing from their own works. Ironically, the latters’ efforts have a ‘clean contrary effect’ to what they intend, as the Law itself says: ‘for it increaseth sin, it worketh wrath, it accuseth, it terrifieth and condemneth’ (Luther : ; LW .). By contrast, the true doers of the Law are those who first believe and through faith perform the Law. ‘We must first receive the Holy Ghost, wherewith we being lightened and made new creatures, begin to do the law.’ Faith, as it were, makes the tree which produces good works. ‘The tree must be first, and then the fruit. For the apples make not the tree, but the tree maketh the apples. So faith first maketh the person which afterwards bringeth forth works. Therefore to do the law without faith, is to make the apples of wood and earth without the tree: which is not to make apples but mere fantasies’ (Luther : ; LW .). ‘[T]he true doer of the law is to be understood, not in respect of the works which he

Galatians :–



worketh, but in respect of the person now regenerate by faith (ex persona per fidem iam facta). . . they that are made righteous, do righteous things’ (Luther : ; LW .). Such people, in whom the remnants of sin persist, do not do the Law perfectly, but their sin is not imputed to them. Thus Luther is here impelled, in his attempt to reconcile these two statements of Paul, to emphasize the newness of life which the believer enjoys in virtue of the gift of the Spirit. Those who truly believe are the ‘doers of the Law’ who Moses sought but could not find under the old dispensation. In so arguing, he comes very close to Aquinas’s view of faith as the cause of our justification. Luther, however, claims that he is here stretching the boundaries of language, that he is, as he puts it, expounding such sayings ‘according to a new and theological grammar’ (Luther : ; LW .). By the same token, the patriarchs and prophets of the Old Testament were righteous, in respect of their faith, not because they were of the Law. Now Luther turns from the anthropological to the soteriological. In what sense does Christ save the sinner? Because the curse of the Law is universal, so too must be the remedy. Christ takes upon himself the sins of the whole world, past, present or to come. He becomes truly accursed, not in that he has himself sinned, but in that he assumes the sins of all. Here Luther is engaged in argument with Jerome and Catholic theologians who deny that Christ was truly accursed, and as so often, is close to Augustine. What is important for Luther is that Christ is made a curse ‘for us’. He is innocent in his own person, but, as ‘all the prophets did foresee in spirit . . . become[s] the greatest transgressor, murderer, adulterer, thief, rebel, blasphemer &c. that ever was or could be in all the world’ (Luther : ; LW .) in order to overcome the power of sin in a duel with sin and death (Luther : ; LW .). Again, it is the doctrine of justification which is at stake for Luther. Those who deny that Christ was made a curse for us, substitute for a saving Christ who removes and destroys human sins, an innocent, righteous man, ‘separate . . . from sins and sinners, and only set him out to us as an example to be followed’. In this way he is not only ‘unprofitable unto us, but also a judge and a tyrant, which is angry with our sin and condemneth sinners. But we must well wrap Christ, and know him to be wrapped, in our sins, our malediction, our death, and all our evils, as he is wrapped in our flesh and blood’ (Luther : ; LW .). But in what way does Christ’s assuming the curse of humankind’s sins bring salvation? Luther depicts salvation here as a cosmic struggle between, remarkably, sin, death and the wrath of God, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the righteousness of Christ, life, and the mercy of God in Christ. It is a struggle between ‘principalities and powers’ (Col :): ‘sin is a mighty and strong god, which devoureth all mankind, learned, unlearned, holy, mighty and wise men, &c.’ Remarkably, the wrath of God (Luther’s paraphrase of the curse) is mentioned in the same



Galatians :–

breath as sin and death, and indeed hell, the devil and all evils. Sin throws itself on Christ, ‘and will needs swallow him up, as he doth all other. But he seeth not that he is a person of invincible and everlasting righteousness. Therefore in this combat (duello) sin must needs be vanquished and killed, and righteousness must overcome, live and reign. So in Christ all sin is vanquished, killed and buried, and righteousness remaineth a conqueror and reigneth for ever’ (Luther : ; LW .). It is as if Luther had conjoined two quite different views of atonement: that whereby Christ overcomes the spiritual powers of evil in some final battle and that whereby Christ earns our salvation and forgiveness by bearing the penalty for our sins. But quite clearly, what is dominant here is the former view: humankind’s salvation derives from Christ’s victory over the powers of darkness. This is brought out clearly in the following passage, where Luther attacks the Arians who deny the divinity of Christ, by arguing that only a divine Christ could have defeated the spiritual powers (Luther : ; LW .–). And this is followed by a further section in which he argues that the victory is appropriated by believers by ‘the happy [ex]change’ which he makes with them, insofar as he takes upon himself their sinful person and they are clothed with ‘his innocent and victorious person’, and so are freed from the curse of the Law. Certainly the notion of Christ as a mediator between humankind and God also occurs in this very dense and metaphorically rich passage. However, the image of Christ’s bearing the curse of the whole world, yet escaping the hold of the dark powers, so that the curse is indeed removed from humankind, is rhetorically much more prominent. ‘[B]ecause he was a person divine and everlasting, it was impossible that death should hold him’ (Luther : ; LW .). It is insofar as believers are united to the pure righteousness, life and everlasting blessedness of the risen Christ that they are freed from the curse, that they receive the promise made to Abraham and are made righteous in him. As Luther himself comments, ‘[t]hese are the reverend mysteries of the Scripture and a true cabbala, which Moses also somewhat darkly in some places did foreshew’ (Luther : ; LW .–). This remarkable meditation on the accursedness of Christ comes extraordinarily close to a form of dualism (is there an intended reference to the dualism of the Zohar in Luther’s allusion to the cabbala?), wherein the wrath of God is referred to along with sin and death as ‘the principalities and powers’ which can be overcome only by the divine figure of Christ, wrapped in human sinfulness. At the same time it leads to the development of an understanding of the holiness of the church which is remarkably rich: I believe that there is no sin and no death in the Church. For they which do believe in Christ, are no sinners, are not guilty of death, but are holy and righteous, lords

Galatians :–



over sin and death, and living for ever. But faith only seeth this, for we say: ‘I believe in an holy Church.’ But if thou take counsel of reason and thine own eyes, thou wilt judge clean contrary. For thou seest many things which offend thee. . . . Therefore the Church is not holy! I deny the consequence. If I look upon mine own person, or the person of my brother, it shall never be holy. But if I behold Christ, who hath sanctified and cleansed his Church, then it is altogether holy; for he hath taken away the sins of the whole world. (Luther : ; LW .)

Calvin For Calvin the claim in v.  that those ‘of the works of the Law are under a curse’ is in the form of an ‘argument from contradictions’. Just as the ‘same fountain does not yield both hot and cold’, so the Law cannot yield both curse and blessing. Those who imagine that they can achieve salvation by the performance of the Law fail, and are therefore under a curse, for there is no one who satisfies the Law. For Calvin, while this is undoubtedly a universal and perpetual truth, it is nevertheless an accidental, not a necessary, truth. It is because of the actual (and universal) weakness of our nature, because ‘men are destitute of the power of keeping the Law’, that they fail, not because the Law given by God necessarily brings with it a curse. The question is where the root cause of this failure to find blessing through the Law, which was its God-given purpose, lies; Calvin will solve it in new ways. He agrees with Luther and Aquinas that ‘of the works of the Law’ refers to those who put their trust for salvation in those works, but whereas for Luther this search to justify oneself was the root cause of men’s and women’s failure to find life by the Law, for Calvin the reason why men and women do not receive the blessing which it offers to those who observe it (Ps !) is ‘because, in the present corruption of our nature, the ability is wanting’. Thus, on Paul’s authority, the Catholic doctrine of the free will is ruled out in favour of a doctrine of human depravity: ‘Paul here places beyond controversy what the Papists today regard as a detestable doctrine, that men are destitute of the power of keeping the law’ (Calvin : ). By contrast, those who live by faith will live and enjoy divine blessing. Faith here is taken to mean ‘the quiet assurance of a conscience that relies on God alone’. There are, then, two ways of justification: one by the Law, which could bring righteousness but in practice always fails because it is effective only if one obeys every part of the Law, and one by faith, which succeeds because it depends on the action of God in Christ in overthrowing the curse of the Law. These two are contradictory as regards justification, but do not essentially conflict, ‘otherwise God would be unlike Himself ’. Believers are not ‘set free from good works’; it is ‘beyond all doubt’ that they ought to keep the Law as far as they can (Calvin : ).



Galatians :–

But none of this will contribute to their justification, which depends on Christ’s overcoming the curse of the Law by taking on himself the curse which properly falls on humankind, while at the same time he is still in himself in a relationship of grace with the Father, the ‘unspotted Lamb of God, full of blessing and grace’. For if he were not, if he regarded the Father as his enemy and was hated by him, how could he reconcile him to us? ‘Therefore the will of the Father always reposed in Him’, even though at the same time ‘He was smitten for our sins and knew God as an angry judge’ (Calvin : ). Calvin, like Chrysostom and unlike Luther and Augustine, does not universalize the curse of the Law: it is specifically attached to the Mosaic Law, and so to those who were under it. Nevertheless, if the blessing of Abraham is available to the Jewish people, once it has been released from the curse of the Law, then the blessing may also ‘proceed from it to the Gentiles’. For if the ‘blessing is in Christ alone, it is faith in Christ which makes us partakers of it’ (Calvin : ). This promised blessing is a spiritual promise (taking the ‘promise of the spirit’ as a Hebrew idiom), not attached to outward things: ceremonies, physical descent, certain types of people, but to be received by faith alone: in this way it is open to Gentiles as much as to Jews. This treatment contrasts sharply with that of Luther, not only in its brevity and controlled concision, but in its concern to uphold the validity of the Law, its focus on the mediatorial work of Christ in reconciling God to humankind. Living by the Law and by faith are not contrasted as two radically opposed ways of existence; accidentally, the way of the Law will yield not a blessing but only a curse, because of human depravity. But this is in no way to suggest that the Law is not the way of God. But for human depravity, Calvin seems to imply, this would have been an entirely appropriate way of existence, which would presumably then have made the way of faith superfluous. By contrast, for Luther, the Law is principally there to demonstrate human sinfulness, which has its root in the desire to justify oneself, and to drive men and women to put their faith in Christ; it is a makeshift to help humankind until such time as the new mode of existence can begin in Christ. Thus Christ’s work is less to rescue humankind from the wrath of God for its breaches of his Law (though that strand is still there), more to rescue it from the dark powers which hold it in bondage, sin, death and the Law(!), however literally or metaphorically these may be understood. The new mode of existence will indeed allow believers to be doers of the Law, but not as people striving to meet the impossible demands of the Law, but as those who are renewed by the Spirit and so perform good works as naturally as a healthy tree brings forth fruit.

Galatians :–



Perkins Perkins, like Calvin, sees Paul’s argument as a syllogism: ‘They which fulfil not the law, are cursed: they which are of works, fulfil not the law: therefore they are accursed’ (Perkins : ). But, unlike Calvin, he takes the curse to be universal, and decries the tendency both outside and inside the church to wish to be justified by works: even those who believe see their own faith as a kind of works. He sets himself to spelling out the nature and effects of the curse. It is both internal, manifested in confusion and turmoil of spirit; and external, ‘spirituall bondage under the power of the divell: who by reason of sinne, workes in the hearts of unbeleevers, Eph . and hath the power of death, Heb ..’ It also involves ‘an enmitie of all the creatures with man, since the fall’ and loss of possessions, friends and reputation (Perkins : ). It is experienced in this life, at its end and in the life to come. The curse is pronounced now in this life. ‘The halter is already about their neckes, and there remaines nothing but the turning of the ladder. Nay the execution is already in blindnesse of mind, and hardnesse of heart’ (Perkins : ). No one can escape the curse through works of the Law, for it is required that all its provisions be obeyed. There is then only one recourse: ‘thou must flie from this sentence of the law, to the throne of grace for mercy’ (Perkins : ). From all this it follows ‘[t]hat it is impossible for any man within himselfe, for the time of this life, to fulfil the law of God’ (Perkins : , interpreting Rom : as referring to Paul’s life as a Christian). This last consideration allows Perkins to make his principal point: namely, that men and women cannot fulfil the Law in this life, for, if they were so able, then ‘Christ should not bee a Saviour, but an instrument of God, to make us our owne Saviours’ (Perkins : ). He then proceeds to attack the papists: first, for their doctrine of venial sins, as if there were some matters which did not detract from the righteousness of the regenerate, and then more generally, for their claims that those who have been justified may fulfil the Law in this life, and then to defend of his own position against those who cite passages in Scripture which talk about the righteousness of figures in the Old Testament and speak about good works. One example must suffice. Confronted with Deut :, ‘Good workes, are workes of God: therefore they are perfect’, he argues that good works are both God’s works in us, and as such perfect, but also our workes and as such contaminated: ‘For when the first and second cause concurre in a worke, the said work takes unto it the condition of the second cause. Water pure in the fountaine, is defiled, when it passes by the filthy channell’ (Perkins : –). The application of all this is clearly spelled out in four points: () If the Law is impossible, then must we ‘seek the fulfilling of it forth from ourselves in Christ’: Christian righteousness is imputed; () we must therefore make the Law a ‘glasse to see our impotencie’

 Galatians :– and to drive us (again and again) to Christ, praying only for God’s Spirit to enable us to obey his laws; () our good works are pleasing to God insofar as there is something in them which is God’s; () even though we may in a measure begin to please God in obedience to his laws, ‘considering we fulfil them not . . . we must humble ourselves under the hand of God even to the death’ (Perkins : ). It is not hard to see the shift here to a Puritanism which places its main emphasis on human frailty and failure and which talks about regeneration in one breath and in the next speaks of believers, in whom God acts, as ‘filthy channells’ which contaminate God’s good works. The believer must, it is true, cleave to God’s commandments and apply himself to knowing God’s laws and walking in his ways. In the end, for Perkins, Paul’s emphasis on the Law (‘whoever does the works of the Law will live by them’) has three purposes: () to teach that ‘the Law is of a constant, and unchangeable nature’; () to remind us of our weakness (if for Luther the theological use of the Law was to drive sinners to Christ, it has now become a means of inculcating a sense of failure and continual sinfulness in believers); () above all to inculcate the need for humility even in those who have begun by grace to obey the Law (Perkins : ). Perkins’s distrust even of regenerate humanity is palpable. What sort of a saviour is it, then, that has redeemed humanity in such an apparently limited manner, and how is such salvation achieved? It is Christ who frees us from the curse of the Law, and he does so by removing us from the power of hell, death and Satan, having bought us with a price. Therefore we should not ‘feare any evill overmuch’: slander, witchcraft, plagues, famine, wars. What is removed is the curse ‘which makes all these, and many other things hurtfull unto us’ (Perkins : ). This account of the removing of the curse of the Law is consistent with Perkins’s discussion at the beginning of the section. But here, as there, the introduction of the devil into a discussion which seems dominated by humankind’s self-inflicted weakness comes as something of a surprise. In any case, Christ’s victory, his redemption of us, seems, for the time at least, to be a relatively limited victory: Satan continues to plague us, but we are not to be unduly worried. Again, as with Calvin, the role of the devil in the curse of the Law is subordinated to that of the Father. Properly speaking, says Perkins, we were not captives to the devil but to ‘the justice of God in the law’; the devil is ‘the minister of God, for the Execution of the same curse’. Thus the ransom price is paid to ‘God, who is the principall, and hath a soveraigntie over him and us’ (Perkins : ). There follows a complex discussion of the sense in which Christ, both God and man, was accursed: Christ in dying suffered the separation of body and soul, but not the putrefaction of the body; he was separated from God in sense and feeling, but did not suffer absolute separation (Perkins : ). This lacks Calvin’s subtlety and elegance, but it does attempt to address some

Galatians :–



of Calvin’s points, if in a rather literally minded way. Calvin claims that Christ bore the full weight of the curse, but how could he if he suffered for such a short period? Answer: man suffers only a finite punishment but suffers it eternally: Christ, being God and man, suffers an infinite punishment but for a limited period (Perkins : –). Certainly the underlying idea is that Christ has assumed the full weight of the curse, and like the sacrificial animal, has borne the curse away for us. The uses of such a doctrine are many; above all, it teaches believers to be obedient to God’s will, particularly in their sufferings. Finally, such freedom from the curse leads to the gift of Abraham’s blessing – that is, righteousness and life everlasting – which in turn leads to the promise of the Spirit – that is to say, that the Spirit manifests itself in us by ‘divine effects in us’ (Perkins : ): illumination, regeneration, self-control, union with Christ, consolation, confirmation in our faith. But the gift of the Spirit must be cultivated: failure to avoid acts which ‘make a breach in conscience’ (Perkins : ) may lead to the Spirit being quenched. Again there is a deep disquietude, anxiety that all these goods so hardly won may be lost by men’s and women’s insolicitude and carelessness. It is as if Perkins takes what is most negative in Calvin’s reading of these verses, his emphasis on human depravity after grace, and links it with Luther’s universalizing of the curse, with its invocation of the devil and the evil powers to portray the depth of humanity’s predicament. What drives this? It seems to be the fear that people are too confident in their faith, not only in the possession of it as the guarantee of salvation, but as the source of good works, and that this in turn leads not only to a sense of ease but also to a loss of intensity and fervour: ‘Our common people, and they that should be wise, say, they looke to bee saved by faith: but indeed they turne their faith to workes. For what is their faith? Surely nothing else (as they say) but their good meaning, or their good dealing, or their good serving of God’ (Perkins : ). For Perkins, such complacency and mildness can only be countered by the rhetoric of the gallows, the ladder about to turn on the convict with the noose around his neck.

Hilgenfeld Hilgenfeld sees v.  with its introductory ‘for’ as providing the grounds for the immediately preceding claim that those who relied on the Law would not inherit the blessing of Abraham: for, should they fail to fulfil it in all particulars, they were under a curse. This technically leaves open the possibility that they might fulfil it and so achieve righteousness, but this is again ruled out by the quotation of Hab : (LXX) arguing that righteousness comes only from faith and not at all from the Law (Hilgenfeld : ). In Christ, however, the curse



Galatians :–

of the Law is broken. He became a curse ‘for our benefit’ (hyper, ‘zu unserem Besten’), not by way of substitution; cf. Rom :). He was cursed because the Law pronounced all those who were hanged on a tree/stake accursed (Paul, citing Deut :, where Paul omits ‘by God’). In this case however the curse fell on someone who was completely innocent, and therefore it was broken. ‘In consequence the curse of the Law for ever lost its validity, because it had on one occasion shown itself to be injust’ (Hilgenfeld : ). Here Hilgenfeld is aware of parting company with both Baur and Ritschl, insisting against them that ‘the notion of redemption (exagorazein) is far more fully developed in Paul than that of the reconciliation of God’ (Hilgenfeld : –, n. ). He argues that neither Rom :– nor Rom : should be understood in terms of substitution. The former talks about Jesus’s death as a demonstration of the righteousness of God; the latter, ‘the fact that Christ remained sinless though being in the flesh, that universal source of sinfulness, is seen as a condemnation of sin in the flesh. By the same token, should not the death of the sinless one on the cross be seen as a condemnation (katakrisis) of the Law, as an actual proof of the invalidity of its curse’ (Hilgenfeld : )? There is, that is to say, a widely held view in the ancient world that a power or principle loses it validity if it exceeds its authority in one particular. Through the breaking of the curse of the Law, the blessing of Abraham is mediated to the Gentiles. Here Hilgenfeld rejects notions of substitution, insisting at the same time that the curse was of a restricted nature, applying only to those who accepted the rule of the Law, something Paul is clearly anxious to prevent the Galatians doing.

Lightfoot Lightfoot in many ways is close to Hilgenfeld, not least in taking Paul to speak of the abolition of the Law and the introduction of a new dispensation. In this they both echo Luther rather than Calvin. Lightfoot sees the passage as arguing that the ‘spirit of the law is antagonistic to faith’. Paul in quoting Deut : appears to have added ‘everyone’ and ‘all’, though the first is present in the Peshitto and the latter in the Samaritan Pentateuch. Jerome accuses the Jews of omitting ‘all’ ‘lest they should appear to be under a curse’ (Jerome, PL .). But, as Lightfoot notes, this is to misunderstand the nature of the text at that time. Whatever the original state of the text, Paul’s meaning is clear. ‘It is impossible to fulfil the requirements of the law and the non-fulfilment lays us under a curse.’ Similarly, there are problems with the citation of Hab :. In its original context it probably contrasted the proud and disturbed character of the Chaldaeans with the confident, trusting character of the Jews (referred to as ‘the just’). Thus it is a word of encouragement given in a particular situation,

Galatians :–



whereas Paul gives it ‘a spiritual meaning and general application’. Law is not based on such faith and trust: but ‘it rigidly enforces the performance of all its enactments’(Lightfoot : ). Just as Lightfoot takes the discussion about the Law to be specifically concerned with the Jewish Law and its operation among the Jews, so too he thinks that v. , referring to Christ’s redeeming ‘us’ from the curse of the Law refers specifically to the ‘deliverance of himself (Paul) and the Jewish race’ (Lightfoot : ). The expression ‘become a curse’ is to be explained partly as a Hebrew idiom, Hebrew being lacking in adjectives, partly in relation to the notion of the sacrificial victim’s ‘bearing of the sins of those for whom atonement is made. The curse is transferred from them to it. It becomes in a certain sense the impersonation of the sin and the curse’ (Lightfoot : ). This notion is ‘prominent in the scape-goat, which Ep. Barn. takes as a type of Christ, and in the idea of a sin-offering’. All these are ‘types of the Great Sacrifice’. Paul stresses the sense in which Christ assumes the curse, but he draws back from citing the words ‘by God’ from the LXX text which reads ‘cursed by God is everyone who hangs on a cross’. By removing the Law, Christ also removes the barrier between Jews and Gentiles, who thus united may now together – in Christ – receive the promise. Paul, that is to say, according to Lightfoot, now extends the horizon: not only does he take ‘redeeming us from the curse of the Law’ to mean redeeming Jews from its slavery, so referring to its abolition for the people of Israel (presumably with the consequence that neither Gentiles nor Jews should any longer observe it), but he further takes the ‘we’ of ‘that we might receive the promise’ to refer to believing Jews and Gentiles. In this he stresses the parallels with Eph :–. Both Hilgenfeld and Lightfoot are much more consciously working as historians, interested in the original meanings of citations from the Old Testament and the shifts in meaning between the Hebrew and Greek texts. Like Hilgenfeld, Lightfoot is using historical modes of enquiry to oppose substitutionary theories of the atonement, although in his case this is not expressly stated. Both see Paul as pronouncing the arrival of a quite new dispensation, in which the Law is no longer valid but replaced by God’s grace and gift of the Spirit, on the one hand, and men’s and women’s faith, on the other, and in this they owe a clear debt to Luther.

Twentieth-century interpretation Bultmann takes ‘the curse of the Law’ to refer to the punishment for sin, equated with transgression of the Law. Christ has redeemed us from this punishment by his vicarious death; this agrees with Paul’s statements about propitiatory



Galatians :–

sacrifice, insofar as they both ‘cancel the guilt or punishment for sin’. Gal :, however, needs to be taken together with :f, where ‘the resulting freedom (here = “adoption as sons”) is not considered to be freedom from the punishment contracted by transgressing the Law, but freedom from the Law itself ’. He also suggests that these verses should be read together with Gal :, where the ‘present age’ is subject to the Law and therefore to sin and death. Hence the freedom bought by Christ’s death is not only freedom from punishment but freedom from those ‘powers’ (sin and death) and thereby is freedom not only from the guilt of sin but above all from sin as a power – i.e. freedom from the compulsion to sin . . . The essential thing, then, is that here the categories of cultic-juristic thinking are broken through: Christ’s death is not merely a sacrifice which cancels the guilt of sin . . . but is also the means of release from the powers of this age: Law, Sin, and Death. (Bultmann : –)

Again, the Lutheran emphasis of this treatment is unmistakable: it lies, however, not in the cultivation of inwardness and unhealthy introspection (a Western plague; Stendahl : ), but rather in the insistence that the old world of guilt and fear has been broken and that believers are freed for a life of faith. This is in striking contrast with Dunn’s reading, which, appealing to his earlier argument at :, takes ‘all who rely on the works of the Law’ to refer to those who in Paul’s judgement were putting too much weight on the distinctiveness of Jews from Gentiles, and on the special laws which formed the boundary markers between them, those who rested their confidence in Israel’s ‘favoured nation’ status, those who invested their identity too far in the presumption that Israel was set apart from the ‘nations’ – including, of course, the Jewish Christians in view in i.– and ii., . (Dunn : )

It is such people who, Paul claims, are failing to do all that the Law requires. They are, however, missing out on the essential demand of the covenant law: What the covenant law demanded, in Paul’s view, is the obedience which expresses such faith (Rom i.), the love which is the outworking of such faith (Gal v.), not requirements of the law as understood and practised in such a way as to deny the sufficiency of the very faith on which the covenant was based. Where his opponents argued from the working out of the covenant: covenant—works of law—exclusion of Gentiles, Paul argued from the foundational character of the covenant: covenant—faith—blessing open to all nations.

Galatians :–



Since the ‘works of the law’ attitude thus prevented the fulfilment of a central feature of the covenant promise it was in fact being false to the covenant, it put itself outside the terms of the covenant, and consequently under a curse. (Dunn

: ) Those who relied on works of the Law in this sense failed to recognize, unlike those of faith, ‘that the covenant with Israel was founded first on grace and promise’ (Dunn : ). Thus, Dunn argues, when Paul distinguishes those of faith from those who rely on works of the Law, he is distinguishing two different understandings of the covenant and of the place of the Law within it; not as Luther and Bultmann would have it, a religion based on Law and one liberated from it. Consistently with such a view, Dunn argues that when Paul says that Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the Law he is referring to all those who are outside the covenant, either Jews who have a ‘“works of the law” attitude’ which ‘put itself outside the terms of the covenant, and consequently under a curse’ or the Gentiles, ‘who are outside the covenant to start with’ (Dunn : , ). In this way, redemption from the curse of the Law does not mark the end of the Law. Paul’s conclusion is ‘that the effects of the curse have been abolished for Gentiles, that the restrictiveness of a law which marked off Jew from Gentile as such had been overcome, not that the law has been abolished, rendered null and void, or without further relevance to Christians’ (Dunn : ). Thus Dunn’s reading portrays Paul as upholding the kind of covenant theology based on God’s gracious election of the people of Israel, received by them in trust, and expressed in obedience to the Law, which Sanders had earlier described as ‘covenantal nomism’ and seen as characteristic of Judaism, as opposed to Paul’s Christian theology. Where Dunn differs from Sanders is in suggesting that this form of theology also characterizes Paul’s thought, which Dunn believes was essentially covenantal in form, rather than, as Sanders would have it, participationist, a religion centred on union with Christ in the Spirit and no longer centred on the Law. This is certainly something of tour de force, particularly in a commentary on Galatians, with its emphasis on the temporal nature of the Law and the role of the Spirit in Christian life. It is particularly remarkable in this passage, where the point at issue is not how to obey the spirit of the Law, how to be faithful to the essence of the covenant, but the quantitive point, that those who want to live by the Law will have to fulfil all its requirements. It is not without interest to note how often Dunn appeals to Romans to support his arguments about Paul’s thought in Galatians.

Galatians :–

The Purpose of the Law and the New Life of Sonship of God

Brief Analysis In this section Paul confronts some of the implications of his claims that the Christian life of faith is based on the gift of the Spirit and is wholly distinct from a life based on works of the Law. He reaffirms his claim that the blessings received in the life of faith are blessings which were promised to Abraham and which can no more be set aside by subsequent arrangements (the Law was established only  years later) than a human will (Greek diathēkē, which can also mean covenant) can be altered after the testator’s death. The promises to Abraham form part of God’s – inalterable – purposes for his people. But what then of the Law, if it brought only a curse? It was, says Paul somewhat obscurely, added because of/for the sake of transgressions. It was not given directly by Galatians Through the Centuries, First Edition. John Riches. © 2013 John Riches. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Galatians :–



God but by angels through an intermediary. Paul attempts to clarify these statements by the use of two further metaphors: that of being ‘shut up, confined, or imprisoned’, sunekleisen, sugkleoimenoi (vv. , ) and that of the paidagōgos, the tutor to young boys for their elementary teaching (v. ). Finally, in vv. –, Paul turns to consider the life of faith whose coming marks the end of the period when the Law was in force. In the new life of faith in Christ Jesus, inaugurated by the believer’s baptism, all are sons (and daughters) of God. And this unity in Christ now characterizes their existence so strongly that all previous social and religious differences are set aside. Furthermore, not only are the old distinctions which were based on the Law and the customs of the ancient world abolished, but the key notion of descent from Abraham is also redefined: sonship of Abraham is no longer to be understood in terms of physical descent but of the fulfilment of God’s promise to Abraham: because the promise is made to Christ as Abraham’s spiritual son, those who are united to Christ in faith are also Abraham’s offspring. This is a very densely argued passage, with many powerful ideas and metaphors which allow commentators to develop many different themes. For our purposes, it will be convenient to focus attention on two main points: ) the purpose and limits of the Law and () the new life of sonship of God through faith in Christ.



The Purpose and Limits of the Law

Marcion On the basis of Tertullian, Marc. .– (ANF .–), the whole section, vv. –, with its discussion of Abraham and the Law, is thought by some (Harnack : *; Lindemann : ) to have been omitted by Marcion. Hoffmann (: ) thinks that, while Marcion would have rejected the connection between Abraham and the ‘promise to Christ’, he would have wanted to affirm Paul’s statement that after the advent of faith, we are no longer under the tutelage of the Law, and would therefore have retained vv.  and –. Irenaeus certainly uses this passage against the Marcionites, arguing that to speak of Christ as the seed of Abraham implies a continuity in the work of God from Abraham to Christ, through whom all things are recapitulated (AH .; ANF .). When he discusses Rom :, a text often discussed in relation to Gal :, Marcion takes it to mean that the Creator’s giving of the Law caused human beings to sin, not just that it brought knowledge of sin (Tertullian, Marc. .; ANF .–).



Galatians :–

Chrysostom Writing in Greek, where the word diathēkē means will, testament and covenant, Chrysostom takes vv. – to affirm the antiquity and unalterability of the covenant between God and Abraham against the relative newness (it was added) and temporariness of the Law. (‘If then it was given until His [Christ’s] advent, why do you protract it beyond its natural period?’; NPNF .). The covenant contained the promise that blessing should come upon the Gentiles through Abraham. His seed, however, is Christ, and therefore those who wish to benefit must be united to him. But if the Law cannot bring the blessing which was promised to Abraham (or else it would annul the promise made to him), what was its purpose? Is it indeed part of the purposes of God at all? The Fathers were careful not to concede anything to Marcion at such points where Paul seems to comes closest to some form of dualism (Wiles : –). But what is it to say that the Law was added because of transgressions? Certainly not that it led to an increase of sinning: it was placed on the Jews ‘as a bridle, guiding, regulating, and checking them from transgressing, if not all, at least some of the commandments’ (NPNF .). It is not ‘against the promises of God’, but is given so that people may long for faith, which ‘comes and sets all right’: it was given ‘to probe their wounds, that they might long for a physician’. The Law, in sum, has a twofold function: to school ‘its followers in a certain degree of virtue’ and to press on them ‘knowledge of their own sins’ (NPNF .). It is not oppressive or antagonistic to men and women; rather, in sharp contrast to his talk of the curse of the Law in vv. –, Paul’s talk of being shut up in vv.  and  portrays the Law not as a prison in which they are incarcerated but as a fortress fencing them ‘round with fear and a life conformable to itself ’, thus preserving them for faith; it ‘is not’, Chrysostom urges against Marcion, ‘the adversary but the fellow-worker of grace’ (NPNF .). Its role is like that of the tutor who prepares young boys for their further studies with a preceptor. So long as he relinquishes his role when the time comes, his work is valuable; were he to seek to prevent the youth from moving on to his further studies, he would, however, cease to benefit the boy. In short, the Law is a – temporary – part of God’s purposes for conferring blessing on Abraham and his heirs, keeping things under control and preparing the Jews for the reception of Christ. To continue to observe it once Christ had come would, however, be to misunderstand its role in relation to the promise made to Abraham. Clearly such a view also removes the basis for the continuance of Judaism as a community based on observance of the Law as an integral part of their covenantal relationship to God.

Galatians :–



Augustine Much like Chrysostom, Augustine sees in v.  an analogy between God’s promises and a human will, which demonstrates the irreversibility of God’s promises to Abraham. The promise is made to Abraham’s seed, which is Christ, ‘that is, all Christians who imitate Abraham by faith’. ‘Seed’ is in the singular, not just because it refers to the one person, Christ, but ‘because the faith is one and it is not possible for those who live carnally by works of the law to be justified in the same way as those who live spiritually by faith’ (Augustine : –). But then what of the Law? It was given specifically to the Jews, to humble those who appealed to the righteousness of their forefather Abraham: ‘transgression of the law was the means by which pride was to be broken in this people, who, bragging about their father Abraham, boasted that they had a kind of natural righteousness’ (Augustine : ). By contrast, the Gentiles could hardly appeal to their idol-worshipping parents. Thus all were ‘imprisoned in their unbelief ’ (Rom :), ‘the Jews for their transgression of the law and the Gentiles for their impiety without the law’ (Augustine : ). That is to say, not only is the Law temporary, it is also restricted to the Jews. It also brought benefits to the Jews: ‘the fact that they were found so near and approached so very near to God that they (the Jewish believers in Jerusalem) sold their possessions was accomplished by the very law under which they were imprisoned and guarded until faith’ (Augustine : ). Thus, again like Chrysostom, Augustine sees the Law as having an educational function even if for him its principal role is as a disciplinarian ruling by fear. In this sense, Paul rebukes those who reject the new order of grace and freedom and wish to return to the old order of fear.

Thomas Aquinas Aquinas, closely following Augustine, sees the opening section (vv. –) as offering a proof by human reason of what Paul had previously argued on the basis of authority: namely, that the Law neither justifies nor is necessary for justification, which is by faith. Aquinas takes Paul’s statement, ‘it was set because of transgressions’ to mean that the Law was given to deal with the consequences of sin, outlined by Bede as ‘wickedness, weakness, passion and ignorance’. The Law was there to restrain wickedness, to reveal humanity’s weakness, to ‘tame the concupiscence of a wanton people, so that, worn out by various ceremonies, they would not fall into idolatry or lewdness’! Fourthly, as ‘a shadow of the good things to come’ (Heb :), the Law was given as a figure of future grace to instruct the ignorant (Aquinas : ; : –). In line with this reading,

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Galatians :–

he takes Paul’s phrase ‘Scripture has shut up all under sin’ to mean giving knowledge of sin, which leads men and women to seek Christ. Again, ‘we were kept shut up’ means that Jews lived ‘not as free men, but as servants under fear’; but also ‘protected, in order that we be not cut off from life, but be made ready unto that faith which was to be revealed’ (Aquinas : ; : –). By the same token, when discussing the phrase ‘our pedagogue in Christ’, Aquinas draws attention to the positive effects of the Law in that the Jews ‘were led to progress in goodness by the love and promise of temporal goods’ (Aquinas : ; : –). There is, that is to say, overwhelming agreement among the commentators to this point that the Law’s function is to restrain and to provide basic ethical instruction. It rules by fear, but it prepares the Jews for the coming of Christ and faith. It is temporary and limited, and has a clear, if also limited, role in God’s overall purposes. Little is made of Paul’s striking claim that the Law was ordained by angels, which some modern commentators (Schlier, Martyn) have seen as derogatory of the Law. Chrysostom is not clear whether this refers to real angels or is simply a circumlocution for Moses and Aaron, who ‘ministered to the delivery of the Law’. Either way, he takes ‘by the hand of a mediator’ to refer to Christ, ‘which shows that he was before it, and Himself the giver of it’ (NPNF .). Augustine is clear that it was real angels, through whom ‘the whole dispensation of the Old Testament was administered’. Nevertheless, the ‘Holy Spirit was active in them and the Word of truth himself, though not yet incarnate, never withdrew from any true administration’ (Augustine : ). Aquinas clearly knows both these readings, but comes closest to seeing in the reference to angels a negative qualification of the Law: ‘ it was given by angels, because it was not fitting that it be given by the Son, Who is greater.’ He clarifies two points: when it says that the Law was ordained, this means ‘that it was given in proper sequence . . . between the time of the law of nature . . . and the time of grace. For before they should receive grace, they had to be convinced by the Law.’ Further, Christ’s mediatorial role is said to be represented by ‘Moses in whose hand the Law was given’ (Aquinas : –; : –).

Luther For Luther, v. , with its question, What then is the purpose of the Law? marks the beginning of a new section, relating to the use and office of the Law, employing certain analogies, of the schoolmaster, the heir in his minority, the two sons of Abraham, and then proceeding to set forth ‘certain precepts concerning manners’. The problem, according to Luther, is that there is a natural disposition to think that the Law is given to make people righteous. But this ‘opinion

Galatians :–



of the righteousness [of the Law] is the sink of all evils, and the sin of sins of the whole world’, for it undermines the very means by which God brings righteousness. Thus this sin is ‘the mighty power of the devil over the whole world, the very head of the serpent, and the snare whereby the devil entangleth and holdeth all men captive’ (Luther : ; LW .). To contradict this opinion, i.e. that the Law justifies, Paul asserts that it was given because of transgressions, which Luther takes in the sense of Rom :, ‘that the offence might abound’, that transgressions ‘might increase, and be more known and seen’ (Luther : ; LW :). For the Law not only brings knowledge of sin, but also sin is ‘increased, stirred up and magnified thereby’ (Luther : ; LW .). The true office and use of the Law is not to justify, but is twofold. First, it is to restrain sin and criminality in society (the civil use). God has ordained ‘magistrates, parents, teachers, laws, bonds and all civil ordinances, that, if they can do no more, yet at the least they may bind the devil’s hands, that he rage not in his bondslaves after his own lust’ (Luther : ; LW .). Second, there is a spiritual or theological use of the Law which is to bring to a person such an awareness of his/her sins that he/she may be brought to despair of any hope of achieving righteousness through his/her efforts. In this way, the Law may drive a person to the ‘promise of grace, and maketh the same sweet and desirable unto him . . . Wherefore we do not abrogate the law, but we shew the true office and use of the law: to wit, that it is a true and profitable minister which driveth a man to Christ’ (Luther : ; LW .). Thus Elijah can stand as a type of the sinner brought to accept the mercy of God. It was only after the strong wind, the earthquake and the fire, which, so Luther, signify the terrors of the Law, that God revealed himself in the soft and gracious wind (Luther : ; LW .–). Already among Luther’s close associates there was disagreement about this doctrine of the two senses or uses of the Law. His close follower Philipp Melanchthon developed a doctrine of the threefold use of the Law (triplex usus legis), where the third use of the Law relates to its teaching role in the church (Melanchthon, CR .f). Melanchthon developed the doctrine specifically in relation to Rom :, reserving Gal : and  Tim : for the first or civil use. The history of these developments in terminology and theological understanding of the Law is well charted in Ebeling : –. Such doctrines were developed fully by Calvin and had great influence within the Reformed tradition. There follows a ‘little digression’ from Paul’s purpose, about the giving of the Law. It was given by angels: whereas ‘the law is the voice of the servants, . . . the Gospel is the voice of the Lord himself ’ (Luther : ; LW .). It was given by a mediator. Moses mediated between the Law and the people. Because the people were unable to accept its spiritual use, the Law had to have a new



Galatians :–

face, ‘must put on a veil, that it may now become tolerable’ (Luther : ; LW .), and, in consequence, no longer fulfils its function. Therefore, concludes Luther ominously, ‘his [sc. Moses’s] disciples, in that he is a mediator or the veil, must always be hypocrites’ (Luther : ; LW .). By contrast with Moses, Jesus Christ is a different sort of mediator. He does not change the voice of the Law, neither does he hide it with a veil; ‘but he setteth himself against the wrath of the law, and taketh it away, and satisfieth the law in his own body by himself ’ (Luther : –; LW .). Here Luther is strikingly at odds with Chrysostom and Augustine (though closer to Aquinas); he sets Christ and Moses over against each other, and in this way sharply distinguishes Law and gospel. The consequences for his view of Judaism are all too clear. Luther takes Paul’s phrase about being shut up under the Law as in a prison until faith should be revealed as applying not only to a particular time in history but also ‘to the inward man. . . . For that which is done as an history, and according to the time wherein Christ came, abolishing the law, and bringing liberty and eternal life to light, is done spiritually every day in every Christian: in whom is found continually, some while the time of the law, and some while the time of grace’ (Luther : –; LW .). The language of the history of salvation is transposed into that of an existential dialectic which will shape Christian inwardness and finds its great exponents in Kierkegaard and Bultmann, or indeed, in a different mode, Heidegger. Luther gives his own vivid account of such experience: The time of the law is when the law exerciseth me, tormenteth me with heaviness of heart, oppresseth, bringeth me to the knowledge of sin, and increaseth the same. Here the law is in his true use [and perfect work]: which a Christian oftentimes feeleth as long as he liveth. . . . This battle doth every Christian experience. To speak of myself, there are many hours in the which I chide and contend with God, and impatiently resist him. The wrath and judgment of God displeaseth me; and again, my impatiency, my murmuring, and such like sins do displease him. And this is the time of the law, under the which a Christian man continually liveth as touching the flesh. ‘For the flesh lusteth continually against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh’ [Gal :], but in some more than others. (Luther : –; LW .)

By contrast, [t]he time of grace is, when the heart is raised up again by the promise of the free mercy of God, and saith: ‘Why art thou heavy, O my soul, and why dost thou trouble me?’ (Ps :) Dost thou see nothing but the law, sin, terror, heaviness, desperation, death, hell and the devil? Is there not also grace, remission of sins, righteousness, consolation, joy, peace, life, heaven, Christ, and God? Trouble me

Galatians :–



no more, O my soul. What is the law, what is sin, what are all the evils in comparison of these things? Trust in God, who hath not spared his own dear Son, but hath given him to the death of the Cross for thy sins. This then is to be shut up under the law after the flesh, not for ever, but till Christ be revealed. (Luther : ; LW .)

In the same vein Luther treats Paul’s image of the Law as a schoolmaster. The law . . . with his rods . . . driveth us unto Christ: like as a good schoolmaster instructeth us and exerciseth his scholars in reading and writing, to the end that they may come to the knowledge of good letters and other profitable things, that afterwards they may have a delight in doing of that which before, when they were constrained thereunto, they did against their wills. (Luther : ; LW .)

The paradox here is that while the Law and the promise are as far apart as heaven and earth, they both operate within one and the same person: ‘but in the inward affection and as touching their office, they ought to be separate far asunder: so that the law may have dominion over the flesh, and the promise may sweetly [and comfortably] reign in the conscience’. Thus Luther’s believer lives and moves in two spheres of very different character: ‘In the spirit thou walkest in the paradise of grace and peace; in the flesh thou walkest in the earth of works and of the cross’ (Luther : ; LW .–). Peace of mind comes from ensuring that the Law and the promise inhabit their own proper sphere. And, as Luther testifies, it is not easily attained.

Calvin Calvin’s argument in this section is influenced by his reading of vv. –, which he sees as an argument from the greater to the lesser: if people respect human agreements, how much more should they uphold what God has established. Unlike many commentators, he does not take diathēkē as will but more generally as agreement, specifically the covenant which God has made with Abraham and through him with Christ. This agreement rests on Christ, enshrines a promise, which is free and concerns the grace of God; unlike the Law, it is not concerned with men and their works (Calvin : –). Here are the roots of later federal theology which will distinguish the covenant of grace from the covenant of Law. What, then, is the Law? While Calvin agrees with Luther that justification by the promise and by the Law are contraries, the one being based on faith which receives what is freely given, the other on works to which a reward is paid, he disagrees significantly over the purpose of the Law. He agrees with Luther and

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Galatians :–

Augustine that Paul here is speaking of the function of the Law in respect of those who are unregenerate and corrupt in their nature. For those, the Law has both the function of restraining evil-doers and of making transgressions obvious, and so compelling people to acknowledge their guilt. This is, however, in no way to deny that the Law is also the ‘rule of a devout and upright life’, but simply to assert that in the present state of corruption of our nature, it ‘merely increases transgression until the Spirit of regeneration comes and writes it on the heart. And He is not given by the law but received by faith’ (Calvin : , italics mine). Nevertheless, Calvin is at pains to stress that when Paul says here that the Law was given because of transgressions, he is not making an exhaustive statement of purpose: ‘The law has many uses, but Paul confines himself to one which serves his present purpose. He did not propose to inquire in how many ways the law is of advantage to men. Readers must be put on their guard on this matter: for I see many make the mistake of acknowledging no other use of the law than what is expressed here. But elsewhere Paul applies the precepts of the law to teaching and exhortation (II Tim .)’ (Calvin : ). The problem with this is that it significantly weakens Paul’s argument against his Galatian opponents. It would be no use his arguing against those who say that the Law needs to be obeyed by Christians as a rule of life that the Law also has other functions. He needs to argue that it properly has only these restraining functions. The crux of this debate is thus the so-called third use of the Law. Did the Law have a continuing function in providing ethical guidance and instruction in Christian life? While Chrysostom, Augustine, Aquinas and Luther all tended in varying degrees to accord the Old Testament Law at best a very minor role in the formulation of Christian ethics, Calvin, by contrast, wanted to assert that, in light of the unity of the Word of God in the Old and New Testaments, the Law does indeed continue to inform and define Christian ethical teaching. Further, this function is the Law’s ‘principal use and more closely connected with its proper end’. It ‘has respect to believers in whose hearts the Spirit of God already flourishes and reigns’ (Instit. II.., my italics), ‘that, by teaching, admonishing, rebuking, and correcting, it may fit and prepare us for every good work’ (Instit. II.., where Calvin specifically argues that the fact that we are freed from the curse of the Law in no way implies that the moral Law is abrogated). There are two main points here: instruction and encouragement. ‘The Law acts like a whip to the flesh, urging it on as men do a sluggish ass.’ But it is also, even with believers ‘in whose hearts the Spirit of God already flourishes and reigns’, in whose hearts ‘the Law is written and engraved . . . the best instrument for enabling them daily to learn with greater truth and certainty what that will of the Lord is which they aspire to follow, and to confirm them in this knowledge’ (Instit. II..). Calvin’s lack of confidence in the Spirit as a guide may well have its roots in the experience of dealing with the Radical Ref-

Galatians :–



ormation and its literal, Spirit-inspired, readings of the Sermon on the Mount. He is not denying the effectiveness in principle of the Spirit’s leading, but he is looking for a clearer and more certain measure of the Spirit’s instruction: hence his falling back on the written Law. In the light of this high doctrine of the Law, it comes as no surprise that Calvin regards the giving of the Law by the angels as ‘a commendation of the law’. In support of his view, he writes merely that ‘there is nothing surprising that angels, by whom God distributes to us some of the smallest blessings, should have been entrusted also with this office of attending as witnesses at the promulgation of the Law’. The interesting point here is perhaps less his seeing the role of the angels as upholding the value of the Law, more his glossing ‘ordained by angels’ by ‘witnessing’ (Calvin : ). So it was God who gave the Law after all. This leaves him with an awkward question. If the Law has a continuing use in the church, in what way can Paul say, as Calvin construes v. , that ‘before faith came, we were kept under the law’, or indeed, that ‘now that faith has come, we are no longer’ under the Law? Calvin is concerned here not to distinguish too sharply between the old and the new covenants: it is not that the old covenant was entirely characterized by the Law and that faith was absent until the coming of the new. When Paul speaks of faith as something which had not yet come, he ‘means the full revelation of those things which were hidden under the darkness of the shadows of the law’. Faith was present among the Fathers: clearly for Paul, Abraham had faith, and Hebrews cites other instances. ‘But since the clarity of faith was not so openly manifested then, he calls the time of the new covenant the time of faith, not relatively, but absolutely.’ In the same way, it is not the Law itself which is abolished, but its qualities: and these are that it gives a reward and a punishment to works; that is, it promises life to those who keep it and curses all its transgressors. It requires from man the highest perfection and precise obedience. It remits nothing, pardons nothing, but calls to reckoning. It does not openly exhibit Christ and His grace but points to Him afar off and enclosed in ceremonies as in wrappings. And I say that all such qualities of the law are abolished according to Paul, so that the office of Moses has ended in so far as it differs in outward aspect from the covenant of grace.

To those, however, who imagine that the Law has therefore nothing to do with us, Calvin replies that ‘the law, so far as it is a rule of life, is a bridle which keeps us in the fear of the Lord, a spur to correct the slackness of our flesh, in short, so far as it is profitable for teaching, correcting, reproving, that believers may be instructed in every good work, is as much in force as ever, and remains intact’ (Calvin : ). Calvin’s development of the doctrine of the continuing use of the Law in the life of the Christian represents a striking innovation in the history of the church.

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Galatians :–

Perkins Perkins, like Calvin, takes diathēkē as covenant or agreement, and proceeds to discuss Christians’ duties in respect of undertakings they may have given, as ‘whether Legacies given to the maintenance of the Masse, may be applied to the maintenance of the true worship of God?’ He has a neat answer: ‘The testator in the giving of such Legacies, hath a double intention: one is general, & that is to preserve the worship of God: the other is speciall, and that is to preserve the idolatry of the Masse. In this he erreth, and therefore his will may be changed. For testaments unlawfully made, may be abrogated’ (: ). Talk of the covenant made with Abraham raises, however, more significant theological questions. Calvin, as we saw, spoke of the covenant of grace, but was clear that it was one where the obligations on the human side of the agreement were fulfilled by Christ (Instit. III..). Tyndale in England, and Zwingli and Bullinger in Switzerland, emphasized the responsibilities which the covenant laid on believers and associated these with the vows taken in baptism. Puritan theology in England was divided on this issue: ‘moderate’ Puritans upheld the necessity of believers fulfilling certain conditions, while ‘strict’ Puritans, among whom notably was Bunyan, followed Calvin (in Bunyan’s case, perhaps more importantly, Luther) in arguing that the covenant was established without conditions as the free election and choice of God. In these matters Perkins is seen as a forerunner of the ‘strict’ Puritan party in England, though his interests were mainly practical and pastoral (Wright ), concerning himself with ‘cases of conscience posed by troubled parishioners to their ministers’ (Greaves : xxi). Even so, one can see how the later divisions are reflected in the tensions in Perkins’s reading of Paul. The covenant with Abraham is ‘a Covenant or compact, because God for his part promiseth remission of sinnes and life everlasting, and requireth faith on our part’. It is like a testament both in that it is confirmed by the death of the testator and that the things promised ‘are given after the manner of legacies, that is freely without our desert, or procurement. In this we see the great goodness of God, who vouchsafeth to name them in his testament, that have made covenant with the divell, and are children of wrath by nature, as we all are.’ All that is required to obtain what is promised is that ‘wee must bring nothing unto God, but hunger and thirst after them, and make suite unto God for them, by asking, seeking and knocking’. Nothing is required of us, for the promises are for the unworthy; ‘it shall suffice for the having of the blessing of God, if our names bee found in the Testament of God’ (Perkins : ). But how can we be sure of that? Here lies precisely the root of the problem of assurance, which occupies so much Puritan attention. If God’s forgiveness is unconditional but limited to the elect, how can we be confident that we are numbered among the elect?

Galatians :–



What then, for Perkins, was the purpose of the Law? Like Calvin, Perkins affirms the continuity between the old and the new dispensations; but there are important differences of emphasis. Both dispensations are concerned with the revelation of sin and of grace, but in different measure: ‘For under the law there was plentifull revelation of sinne, with darke and small revelation of grace: but at the comming of Christ, men saw heaven opened, and there was a plentifull revelation of sinne, with a more plentifull grace, and mercie’ (Perkins : ). The key point for Perkins is less the sense in which the Law continues to provide the measure of Christian moral instruction. More importantly, the Law’s function of revealing sin continues in the life of the Christian and becomes a defining aspect of such existence: ‘When Paul says, We are all shut up under sinne, he puts us in mind of our most miserable condition, that wee are captives of sinne and Satan, inclosed in our sinnes as in a prison, like imprisoned malefactours that waite daily for the coming of the Judge, and stand in continuall feare of execution’ (Perkins : ). Here the use of the language of the gallows is closely linked to injunctions to bear the vicissitudes and injustices of life, in a manner to bring out clearly its function of social control. Againe, if we seriously bethinke ourselves that we are captives of sinne, and worthy of death, it will make us with contentation of minde to bear the miseries of this life, sicknesse, povertie, reproach, banishment, &c. considering that they come farre short of that wee have deserved; who are no better than slaves of sinne and Satan. (Perkins : )

This contrasts with Luther, who certainly emphasizes the continuing presence of the Law in the lives of believers, but does so in such a way that the coming of Christ to liberate from the Law is also an integral part of the existential dialectic of believers (Luther : –; LW .–). Perkins simply takes the aorist ‘Scripture imprisoned everything under sin’ as referring to the present condition of believers: ‘We are all shut up under sinne’ (Perkins : ). This in turn stands in sharp contrast to Perkins’s other concern, which is that true believers, as opposed to those whom he regards as believers in name only, should be distinguished by the liveliness of their faith and renewal. Lastly, we see here that many among us do not hold Christ, or beleeve in him aright, for their justification: because they hold him without change of heart and life. For by Paul’s conclusion, whom Christ quickeneth, them hee justifieth: and whom he doth not quicken, them he doth not justifie. Examine thy selfe then: if Christ have sanctified and renewed thy heart, thou art justified: if thy heart be yet unsanctified, and thy life unreformed, deceive not thyselfe with fond imaginations: thou are not yet justified. (Perkins : )



Galatians :–

It is not difficult to see how such teaching would hugely increase Puritans’ anxiety about whether they were or were not of the elect. How, on such terms, could one ever be certain of salvation? It is illuminating to see how many of the leading figures in subsequent movements would take comfort here from Luther: notably Bunyan and the Wesleys (see pp. –). Perkins concludes with a long discussion of how far the Law is abrogated, how far it continues to govern Christian action. The ceremonial aspects of the Law are abolished; the moral law continues, though its rigour is diminished: ‘God accepts the indeavour to obay, for obedience itselfe. Neverthelesse, the law, as it is the rule of good life, is unchangeable, and admits no abrogation. And Christ in this regard did by his death establish it, Rom. .’ (Perkins : ). This clearly raises a set of questions about how the distinction between the ceremonial and moral and, he adds, judicial Law is to be applied to the prescriptions of the Old Testament. Ceremonial laws are set aside, the moral law is upheld; judicial laws which are ‘in foundation and substance moral’ are retained (Perkins : ). This leads to some interesting detailed discussions. The sabbath laws are moral insofar as there should be a holy rest, but ceremonial insofar as they ordain rest on the seventh day. Judicial laws are to be retained insofar as they relate to the Ten Commandments. Idolatry among the Israelites was deserving of death (Deut :), and this serves to uphold the first commandment; similarly, those who ‘have been borne, baptized, and brought up among us, and yet afterwards become Masse priests, and seeke maliciously and obstinately, without ceasing to seduce our people, deserve in this respect, to be put to death’. Similar considerations apply to witches, ‘who renounce God, and humane societie: and therefore are worthily cut off, though they doe no hurt; even because they make a league with the devill’ (Perkins : ). Leviticus  commands that adulterers be put to death, and Perkins approves, notwithstanding Christ’s pardoning of the woman taken in adultery, for it upholds chastity in line with the seventh commandment. He acknowledges that ‘innumerable persons must die’, but simply asserts that ‘We must doe that which we find to be the will of God: and the events of things must be left to God’ (Perkins : ). Finally, to add further confusion, he asks, ‘what is our guide now in the time of the new Testament, seeing the regiment and law of Moses is abrogated?’, and answers that the ‘outward guide is the doctrine of the morall law, and of the Gospel’, while ‘the inward guide, is the Spirit of God, writing the lawes of God in our hearts, and by them guiding us, and being a law unto us’ (Perkins : ).

Galatians :–



Lightfoot Lightfoot, like Calvin, takes diathēkē to mean ‘covenant’ not ‘will’, and provides careful lexicographical support for this, appealing above all to its use in the LXX as a translation of berith, which contrasts with classical usage but is almost always followed in the New Testament. Lightfoot is clear about the inferiority of the Law to the promise to Abraham and his seed. First; Instead of justifying it condemns, instead of giving life it kills: it was added to reveal and multiply transgressions. Secondly; It was but temporary; when the seed came to whom the promise was given, it was annulled. Thirdly; It did not come direct from God to man . . . Fourthly; As follows from the idea of mediation, it was of the nature of a contract, depending for its fulfilment on the observance of its conditions by the two contracting parties. Not so the promise, which, proceeding from the sole fiat of God, is unconditional and unchangeable. (Lightfoot : )

He is in no doubt that the reference to the role of the angels in giving the Law was intended by Paul to emphasize the inferiority of the Law. This was in sharp contrast to a tradition of interpretation with roots in Deut :, where the presence of the angels with God was intended ‘to glorify the law’ (Jos. Antiquities xv. , ; Jubilees ; Acts :; Lightfoot : ). This reading of the passage with its strong deprecation of the Law is further reinforced by Lighfoot’s understanding of v. : ‘no mediator can be a mediator of one.’ The Law is of the nature of a contract between the two parties, God on the one hand, and the Jewish people on the other. It is only valid so long as both parties fulfil the terms of the contract. It is therefore contingent and not absolute . . . Unlike the law, the promise is absolute and unconditional . . . The giver is everything, the recipient nothing. (Lightfoot : )

The Law’s temporal limitation is clearly set out in v. : ‘the law condemned all alike, yet not finally and irrevocably, but only as leading the way for the dispensation of faith, the fulfilment of the promise.’ He takes the aorist sunekleisen . . . upo amartian, ‘shut up under sin’, to mean ‘subjected to the dominion of sin without means of escape, not an action which could be attributed to the Gospel.’ For this reason, Lightfoot is inclined to reject understandings of paidagōgos . . . eis Christon as ‘one to conduct us to the school of Christ’. The Law’s role is simply to hold men and women captive until the coming of Christ (Lightfoot : –). This is very clearly a Lutheran reading, though it is Luther without the same intensity of Angst.



Galatians :–

Hilgenfeld For Hilgenfeld, this section runs from : to : and is about ‘the relationship of pre-Christian to Christian religion’. The section describes the preparatory, pedagogical, though subordinate role of the Law in relation to ‘righteousness by faith, which ends the oversight of the Law and fulfils the promise. Humanity is lifted up by the appearance of Christ out of its state of immaturity (Unmündigkeit) and servitude and brought to spiritual maturity and freedom’ (Hilgenfeld : ). Hilgenfeld considers three possible understandings of the purpose of the Law: to curb the worst effects of sin, which he rejects as inconsistent with v. ; to increase knowledge of sin, which he rejects on linguistic grounds; which leaves only ‘to increase sinfulness’, which is supported by other Pauline statements (Rom :). The universality of sin can be seen as a pedagogical preparation for grace, and, moreover, it contains the second view of the Law’s purpose implicitly. This chimes in with a wider view of the history of religions: ‘Should we not see here the inner dialectic of the religion of law, which Paul himself brings out at :, that all humanity must die to the law through the law, in order to enter into a new relationship with God?’ (Hilgenfeld : ).

Twentieth-century interpretation Bultmann stands firmly in the Lutheran tradition when he understands :, ‘for the sake of transgressions’, as ‘in order to evoke transgressions’ and sees this function of leading people into sin, and not some kind of educative role, ‘train[ing] man up to a higher level of mental (and especially of ethical) life’, as ‘the purpose of the Law in the history of salvation’ (Bultmann : –). What is wrong about the way of the Law is not ‘that this way leads to subjective despair’; nor does Paul ever praise ‘faith as the escape from an inner division caused by conscience, or as a release from an unbearable burden . . . The way of the Law is wrong not because in consequence of transgressions it does not lead to the goal, but because its direction is wrong, for it is the way that is supposed to lead to “one’s own righteousness”’ (Bultmann : –). There is a unity in God’s purposes in giving the Law and in giving the gospel. In both cases God, out of his grace, wills to give life to men and women. In the case of the Law, this ‘life-giving purpose is defeated by man’s sinful desire, that still was not able to wipe out God’s grace, for it is still God’s grace that the Law factually led “to death,” because by this route man is led to God, the “God who gives life to the dead”’ (Bultmann : ). Thus for Bultmann the Law does not prepare people for the reception of the gospel by educating them morally; it brings them under the power of sin, to ‘death’. Nevertheless, the new existence which one finds in the gospel,

Galatians :–



stands in historical continuity with the old. . . . He, the sinner who is in death, is confronted by the gospel when it reaches him with the decision whether or not he is willing to understand himself anew and to receive his life from the hand of God. The possibility of understanding is given him in the very fact that he is a sinner, that he is in death. . . . Salvation is naught else than the realization of that destined goal of ‘life’ and selfhood which are God’s will for man and man’s own real intention, but which were perverted under sin.

This new life is characterized by freedom from the Law: ‘[t]he old period of the “custodian’s” restraint lies in the past; the man who once held the position of a slave under the Law has been set free, to be no longer a ward; now he has the rights of a son’ (Bultmann : ). Like Luther, Bultmann acknowledges the salvation-historical language in this passage, dividing the world into different historical dispensations in relation to the Law, but still reads this as referring to the Existenz of the individual: ‘However much Paul’s view of the history of salvation is oriented toward mankind, and not the individual, it is still true that the situation of mankind is also that of the individual’ (Bultmann : ). Thus human existence can be – universally, or better, in each and every case – grasped in terms of the dialectic of existence of Law and gospel, of life prior to faith and life under faith. It is interesting to compare Dunn’s views of this passage with Bultmann’s. Whereas Bultmann sees the problem for Paul lying in the direction of the way of the Law in Judaism, i.e. that it was pursued in order to secure ‘one’s own righteousness’, Dunn sees Paul’s critique here as directed against a ‘works of the law’ attitude, against an identity determined ‘from (works of) the law’. When Paul says that the Law was added for the sake of transgressions, he means probably ‘in order to provide a way of dealing with, in order to provide some sort of remedy for transgressions’. . . . What was in view, in other words, would be that whole dimension of the law so largely lost to sight in modern Christian treatments of Paul – viz. the sacrificial system, whereby transgressions could be dealt with, whereby atonement was provided. (Dunn : –, referring to Rom :)

Broadly in line with this, Dunn takes ‘confined under the law’, as does Chrysostom, as a form of protective custody – ‘Israel like a city garrisoned by the law within a larger territory ruled by sin’. This role, which Paul also speaks of in terms of the Law as a custodian (paidagōgos), may also include some basic instruction ‘in good manners’ but is a temporary one for those for ‘whom faith has come’. This is not to say that, even for those, the Law has no further role; only that its custodial role is now at an end (Dunn : –). But, pace Dunn, what Paul is arguing, against those who want to go on observing the Law,



Galatians :–

is that its role as a custodian was precisely the point of the Law. And, Paul continues, that role is now at an end. In the light of this, to propose that Paul was arguing for some modified form of covenantal nomism, seems, as Martyn says, ‘altogether beside the mark’ (Martyn : ).



New Life as Sons (and Daughters?) of God

Patristic and medieval interpretation For Chrysostom, once faith comes, believers are no longer under a tutor, but have become sons of God. Paul does not say that they are sons of God in virtue of being born of God as John does but rather, ‘in a much more awful point of view’, by virtue of putting on Christ in baptism, which is to say that they have the Son within them, are made like him, and ‘brought into one nature and kindred with him’ (NPNF .). Thus in v.  the emphasis is less on the unity that there is among Christians, than on their unity with Christ. What Paul says here ‘may serve to convey a still closer oneness with Christ . . . Ye have all one form and one mould, even Christ’s. What can be more awful than these words! He that was a Greek or Jew, or bond-man yesterday, carries about with him the form, not of an angel or archangel, but of the Lord of all, yea displays in his own person the Christ’ (NPNF .). There is a marked change of tone in Augustine’s treatment of the passage. Paul, in writing that they are all sons of God through faith in virtue of their baptism into Christ, is attempting to assure the Gentiles that they are in no way inferior to those who were previously under the guardianship of the Law. On the contrary, it is by putting on Christ, and not by nature, that all are made ‘sons of God and brothers of the Mediator’. Nevertheless, rather than extolling this new state, as Chrysostom does, Augustine immediately begins to qualify what is being said. The present state of union through faith is contrasted with the future unity which will be accomplished ‘by sight itself ’ (Augustine : ). Nor are social distinctions yet removed: ‘For now, although we have the first-fruits of the spirit (Rom :), which is life, on account of the righteousness of faith, yet because the body is still dead on account of sin, that difference, whether of peoples or of legal status or of sex, while indeed removed in the unity of the faith, remains in this mortal life.’ Augustine’s concerns with social order and cohesion are clear: ‘That this order is to be observed on this life’s journey is the teaching of the apostles’ (Augustine : ), referring to the household codes and Jesus’s saying about giving what is Caesar’s to Caesar.

Galatians :–



Thomas Aquinas For Aquinas, v.  above all stresses the point that diversity plays no part in and provides no obstacle to the unity of believers with Christ. The point is not that such divisions are set aside, but that they have no bearing on a person’s ability to receive the effect of baptism (Aquinas : –; : ). But while such differences may continue in the world, within the church things are different. Truly, none of these things makes a difference in Christ, because all of you, i.e. believers, are one in Christ Jesus, because through baptism you have all been made members of Christ and you form one body, even though you are distinct individuals . . . Now where there is unity, difference has no place. Indeed it was for this unity that Christ prayed. (Aquinas : –; : )

It is true that Aquinas here carefully restricts himself to discussion of the status of the baptized, and in no way broaches questions of the eucharist and the sacraments of ordination. Nevertheless, what he says clearly raises questions about the way in which social status and gender have been allowed to determine roles within the church.

Luther The existential dialectic of Law and gospel within the believer makes it vital for Luther to uphold the reality of the spiritual sphere within the Christian. It is not merely a matter of a different cast of mind, but it is a new state of being which results from the Christian’s union with Christ. Those who are children of wrath have been made ‘children and heirs of God, fellow-heirs with the Son of God, and lords over heaven and earth’ (Luther : ; LW .). They have in baptism been regenerated and renewed by the Holy Ghost to a heavenly righteousness and to eternal life, there riseth in them also a new light and a new flame; there rise in them new and holy affections, as the fear of God, true faith and assured hope &c. There beginneth in them also a new will. And this is to put on Christ truly and according to the Gospel. (Luther : ; LW .–)

For Luther, both sides of the existential dialectic of Law and gospel are a reality: his affirmation is that it is the life of grace in the gospel which triumphs: the Christian is transposed into a new state, transcending the life of the flesh. In this light, all natural states, even such as are ordained of God ‘are nothing’. Luther’s emphasis, in discussing Paul’s list of the various states which have



Galatians :–

been made nothing, lies heavily on the Jew and the Greek. His list announces the setting aside of the Law, and indeed of the wisdom and righteousness of the Gentiles. But this setting aside, this considering as nothing, does not indicate that the states themselves are abolished. Servants and masters, husbands governing families and ‘living decently towards all men’, wives living chastely, obeying their husbands, doing the housework and bringing up the children in a godly manner, are still very much part of his world. However, none of these things makes a person righteous, delivers them from death. In the world, the differences between persons must be diligently observed. In Christ, all such differences are overcome, and all are equal in receiving the promise of eternal life. Insofar as we have faith, we are joined to Christ. Against the enthusiasts, who claim that Christ is only speculatively in us while really in heaven, Luther insists: ‘Christ and faith must be thoroughly joined together. We must be in heaven and Christ must live and work in us. Now, he liveth and worketh in us, not by speculation and naked knowledge, but indeed and by a true and a substantial presence’ (non speculative, sed realiter, praesentissime et efficacissime; Luther : ; LW .).

Calvin In view of his emphasis on the continuing importance of the Law in the life of the church and the individual, it might well be asked in what sense, for Calvin, is the life of the covenant of grace new? Those who believe are no longer held in servitude by the Law but are ‘set free by faith when we are adopted by means of it’: those who believe become sons of God. In what sense? We are united with the Son of God, ‘so that what belongs to Him is communicated to us’. Calvin is cautious, however, of language which suggests a real indwelling of Christ in the believer or a conjunction of the two. Paul uses the metaphor of a garment, meaning that ‘in the sight of God, they bear the name and person of Christ and are viewed in Him rather than in themselves’. The motif of imputation, that is to say, is reintroduced to correct any more realistic understandings of justification. Calvin is also wary of a simple appeal to baptism, ‘as many of you as were baptised’. For baptism ‘is far from being efficacious in all’. Calvin distinguishes the sacramental signs from ‘the truth which they figure’. Hypocrites boast in the sign and are mistaken. Paul speaks here, however, to believers for whom the truth ‘becomes joined to the sign’ (Calvin : ). What is interesting here is that while Calvin quite consciously plays down the sense in which believers are united to Christ, rooting the believers’ union with Christ in the way that God regards them, he nevertheless affirms the unity of all believers one with another, without qualification. The meaning of Paul’s statement that there is

Galatians :–



neither Jew nor Greek ‘is that there is no distinction of persons, and therefore it does not matter to what nation or class anyone may belong. Nor is circumcision any more regarded than sex or civil rank. Why? Because Christ makes all one. Whatever other differences there may be, the one Christ suffices to unite them all’ (Calvin : ). The strength of Calvin’s position is precisely that unity in Christ does not depend on any quality or virtue in believers, but solely on the grace of God. Thus there are, or should be, no distinctions or hierarchies within the ranks of the believers. On the other hand, the emphasis on God’s covenant of grace, on God’s election, raises the deeply disturbing question as to how to determine whether any given person is actually among the elect.

Perkins Calvin’s declaration of the union of all differences in Christ certainly sounds remarkably egalitarian. It is then disturbing to see what one of his close followers, Perkins, makes of v. . Perkins raises two questions: first, ‘whether Magistracie and government be necessary in the society of Christians’. Here he follows Luther in distinguishing between the ‘Regiment of this world, in civill societie’ and the ‘regiment of the Kingdome of heaven, which stands in Justice, peace of conscience, joy in the Holy Ghost’. In the first there is difference of rank and status, but not in the second, where all are one in Christ. His second question is whether ‘bondage, in which some are Lords, others bondmen, or slaves, may stand with Christian religion?’ The answer, with its scriptural supports, runs as follows: ‘It may, in the countries where it is established by positive lawes, if it be used with mercy and moderation. Righteous Abraham had in his owne house, bondslaves: Gen .. God did permit the Jewes to buy the children of the Canaanites, Lev ..’ Christian liberty, that is to say, is a matter of the ‘inward man’. In this life we have spiritual liberty; bodily liberty belongs to the life to come (Perkins : –). So, contrary to its evident sense, the text becomes the warrant for social division and distinction: ‘There are distinctions of men in respect of nation, some Jewes, some Gentiles: in respect of condition, some bonde, some free, some rich, some poore, some in authority, some in subjection, &c. in respect of sexe, some men, some women: yet in Christ Jesus, all are even as one man’ (Perkins : –).

Lightfoot Lightfoot translates v.  as ‘For you are all sons of God by your faith, sons of God in Christ Jesus’ (Lightfoot : ). The emphasis is on ‘all’ and ‘sons’,



Galatians :–

where ‘sons’, as elsewhere in Paul, has above all the connotation of freedom (in contrast here with their former state under the paidagōgos). ‘In Christ Jesus’ should be taken separately from ‘faith’. The words are ‘thrown to the end of the sentence so as to form in a manner a distinct proposition, on which the Apostle enlarges . . . “You are all sons by your union with, your existence in Christ Jesus.”’ Hence Lightfoot, despite his subsequent position as bishop of Durham, is unambiguous in his affirmation of the equality which exists between all believers. In Christ ye are all sons, all free. Every barrier is swept away. No special claims, no special disabilities exist in Him, none can exist. The conventional distinctions of religious caste or of social rank, even the natural distinction of sex, are banished hence. One heart beats in all: one mind guides all: one life is lived by all. You are all one man [sic, his emphasis], for ye are members of Christ. (Lightfoot : )

Quite what this might mean is, however, less clear to him, given that the distinction between male and female is ‘no longer social but physical’. He notes the saying from the apocryphal Gospel of the Egyptians (Clement of Alexandria, Strom. .), that Jesus, asked by Salome, when the kingdom should come, answers: ‘When the two shall be one, and the male with the female, neither male nor female.’ However, while noting the mystical character of such language, he does little to clarify its meaning in Paul.

Hilgenfeld For Hilgenfeld, the statement in v.  that God is not a mediator but is one, refers to the fact that God, unlike a mediator, does not, in the promise, act on behalf of one side over against another, as in the Law, where he stands over against human weakness; whereas ‘he not only gave the promise absolutely unconditionally and without any reservation or relativity as a pure act of grace, he also realized through the same activity, which was appropriate to him alone, the ‘making alive’ (zōopoiēsai), which is lacking from the Law’ (Hilgenfeld : ). The religion of Law was then a form of ‘captivity under the power of sin’ which embraced the whole of humankind, v. , whose purpose was none other than to ‘realise the promise through the inner necessity of turning to God in faith’. The oversight of the Law is thus completely removed by the historical event of faith, because believers now enter into a filial relationship to God. ‘This communion with God is so new, that in it all previous distinctions of nation, rank and gender are completely abolished, that in Christ universal human unity is achieved’ (Hilgenfeld : –). It is nevertheless one in which Jew-

Galatians :–



ishness is excluded and in which the new humanity assumes the name of sons of Abraham. There is that is to say, an obliteration of difference, alongside the affirmation of unity. Nor is it entirely clear, as with most of the commentators we have reviewed, in what sense distinctions of nation, rank and gender are completely abolished.

Liberationist and feminist readings of Gal : Gal : has enjoyed considerable prominence over the last  years, where it has often been cited in ecclesiastical debates about slavery and racial discrimination (Smith ; Williams ), the ordination of women (Hayter ; Swartley ), and gay and lesbian matters (Williams : ). One of the striking features of the abolitionist debate is that Paul was cited only with great reservation by abolitionists, precisely because of the use made by antiabolitionists of Pauline and deutero-Pauline texts. Thus the slave poet Jupiter Hammond cites Eph :–: ‘Here is a plain command of God for us to obey our masters. It may seem hard for us, if we think our masters wrong in holding us slaves, to obey in all things, but who of us dare dispute with God!’ (Callahan : ). There are nevertheless some powerful examples of appeals to the Galatians text, even if Paul’s name is often omitted. This is how Mary McLeod Bethune describes her moment of illumination: With these words the scales fell from my eyes and the light came flooding in. My sense of inferiority, my fear of handicaps, dropped away: ‘Whosoever’, it said. No Jew nor Gentile, no Catholic or Protestant, no black nor white; just ‘whosoever.’ It meant that I, a humble Negro girl, had just as much chance as anybody in the sight and love of God. These words stored up a battery of faith and confidence and determination in my heart, which has not failed me to this day. (Callahan : , citing Lerner : )

For others, however, this denial of the importance of difference, whether based on ethnicity, religious belief, or gender, can pose a threat to their very existence. For Daniel Boyarin this is the key text for his understanding of Paul the ‘cultural critic’ for whom there is a central tension between ‘powerful self-identification as a Jew . . . and an equally powerful, or even more powerful, identification of self as everyman’ (Boyarin : ). In his interpretation of the baptismal formula in Gal :, writes Boyarin, Paul is asserting that [i]n the baptism there was a new birth (or a new creation), which is understood as substituting an allegorical genealogy for a literal one. In Christ, that is, in baptism, all the differences that mark off one body from another as Jew or Greek . . .



Galatians :–

male or female, slave or free, are effaced, for in the Spirit such marks do not exist. Thus . . . Paul marks the analogous statuses of gender and ethnicity and the transcendence of both in the spirit: ‘For you are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus.’ (Boyarin : )

But this undermines precisely all those whose identity is crucially related to the valuing of such differences. What will appear from the Christian perspective as tolerance, namely Paul’s willingness – indeed insistence – that within the Christian community all cultural practice is equally to be tolerated, from the rabbinic Jewish perspective is simply an eradication of the entire value system which insists that our cultural practice is our task and calling in the world and must not be abandoned or reduced to a matter of taste. The call to human Oneness, at the same time that it is a stirring call to equality, constitutes a clear threat as well to Jewish (or any other) difference. While it is not anti-Semitic (or even anti-Judaic) in intent, it nevertheless has had the effect of depriving continued Jewish existence of any reality or significance in the Christian economies of history. (Boyarin : )

This powerful cultural critique of Paul resonates with similar unease among Black movements with such down-playing or eradication of difference (Williams ). The most sustained discussion of the passage and its place in Paul’s thought has undoubtedly come from feminist theologians, as they have sought to rewrite the history of early Christianity in order to discern the place of women in the earliest communities, and to identify the ideologies which both encouraged and sought to marginalize and suppress them. For Schüssler Fiorenza the baptismal ‘confessional formula’ in Gal :– is a product of the pre-Pauline church and provides clear evidence for the emancipatory outlook of the earliest Christian communities, which saw themselves called to a ‘discipleship of equals’. ‘Jesus and his movement offered an alternative interpretation of Torah that opened up access to God for everyone who was a member of the elect people of Israel, and especially for those who, because of their societal situation, had little chance to experience God’s power in the Temple and Torah’ (Schüssler Fiorenza : ). Women played an active part in the early Christian missionary movement and also in the churches in which Paul moved. Schüssler Fiorenza quotes with approval Meeks’s account of the effect that celebrating such a ritual in the first century could have had: . . . a resident of one of the cities of the province Asia who ventured to become a member of one of the tiny Christian cells in their early years would have heard the utopian declaration of mankind’s reunification as a solemn ritual pronouncement. Reinforced by dramatic gestures (disrobing, immersion, robing), such

Galatians :–



a declaration would carry – within the community for which its language was meaningful – the power to assist in shaping the symbolic universe by which that group distinguished itself from the ordinary ‘world’ of the larger society. As a ‘performative utterance’ it makes a ‘factual’ claim about an ‘objective’ change in reality that fundamentally modifies social roles. New attitudes and altered behavior would follow – but only if the group succeeds in clothing the novel declaration with an ‘aura of factuality’. (Meeks : )

The evidence that such changes in attitude and behaviour did indeed occur can be found both in the New Testament and in later sources in terms of the missionary activity and leadership roles which women enjoyed. Schüssler Fiorenza cites Pliny and Ignatius. It chimes in with Christian beliefs that ‘they were truly set free by Christ’; Galatians itself is written to uphold the ‘abolition of the religious distinctions between Jew and Greek’ (Schüssler Fiorenza : –). There is also ample evidence of a steady process of patriarchalization. The question is to what extent Paul was party to such resistance to the liberation of women. Here one has to weigh the evidence, on the one hand, of Paul’s own engagement with the issue of Jews and Gentiles in the church and his declaration at the end of the letter that ‘neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is of any importance, but a new creation’ (Gal :); and, on the other, his own use of the baptismal formula in  Cor : and  Cor :–. The difficulties here, as Schüssler Fiorenza acknowledges, are considerable, not least because it is difficult to reconstruct the situation regarding women in Corinth (had they decided to set aside marriage?) and also because Paul’s advice to slaves in  Cor : is patient of quite contradictory interpretations. Schüssler Fiorenza sees Paul as offering advice in relation to marriage which is both liberative and also significantly limiting. To advise women to remain free from the marriage bond was a frontal assault on the intentions of existing law and the general cultural ethos, especially since it was given to people who lived in the urban centres of the Roman empire. . . . Moreover, his advice to women to remain nonmarried was a severe infringement of the right of the paterfamilias since, according to Roman law, a woman remained under the tutorship of her father and family, even after she married. Paul’s advice to widows, who were not necessarily ‘old’ – since girls usually married between twelve and fifteen years of age – thus offered a possibility for ‘ordinary’ women to become independent.

On the other hand, his argument that women who marry were ‘divided’ and therefore not as ‘equally dedicated to the affairs of the Lord as the nonmarried, implicitly limited married women to the confines of the patriarchal family. . . . One can only wonder how Paul could have made such a theological point when he had Prisca as a friend and knew other missionary couples who were



Galatians :–

living examples that his theology was wrong’ (Schüssler Fiorenza : –). Summarizing a long discussion, Schüssler Fiorenza concludes that Paul’s interpretation of the baptismal formula affirms the equality and charismatic giftedness of women and men in the Corinthian community. Women as well as men are prophets and leaders of worship in the community. Women as well as men have the call to a marriage-free life. Women as well as men have mutual rights and obligations within the sexual relationships of marriage. However in introducing a distinction between those who are married and those who are not, with respect to missionary work, Paul relegates the former to the cares of this world and ascribes to the latter a special pure and holy state. Therefore, he restricts more severely the active participation of Christian wives in the worship of the community. His use of the virgin-bride metaphor for the church, as well as his figurative characterization of his apostleship as fatherhood, opens the door for a re-introduction of patriarchal values and sexual dualities. (Schüssler Fiorenza : –)

The same topics are given a rather different account in Rosemary Radford Ruether’s Women and Redemption. She too believes that the baptismal formula in Gal :– is pre-Pauline and represents early attempts to provide a theological backing for the life of the early Christian missionary circles, with their egalitarian ethos. In particular, the emphasis on ‘no more male and female’ represented attempts to overcome sexual bimorphism through celibacy, with women aspiring to be men. Paul, Ruether believes, took over the baptismal formula in Galatians, not because he was interested in an ‘ontological return to prefallen wholeness or its implications of social equality of women with men, slaves with masters, that would allow either women or slaves to throw off their subordination to the paterfamilias of the household’. What interested Paul was the ‘religio-ethnic pair, Jew-Greek’. It was only when he encountered a community in Corinth that did take the theology of the baptismal formula seriously that Paul had to take note of ‘these gender implications’. This led him to reformulate ‘the baptismal formula itself so that it lost both its ontic gender implications and its social implications for both women and slaves in the patriarchal household’ (Ruether : ). This is an interesting variation on Schüssler Fiorenza’s account, and it certainly gives expression to much feminist suspicion of Paul. Luise Schottroff has written powerfully about Paul’s ‘divided consciousness’ (Schottroff : ). At the same time, Ruether underplays the sense in which Paul has exploited the baptismal formula in Galatians, with his emphasis on freedom, the release from the present evil age and its structures and on the new creation (:, :) which has been inaugurated in Christ. For Martyn, the pairs of opposites in Gal :

Galatians :–



represent the building blocks of the old world, which is being replaced by God’s action in establishing a new creation. ‘In a word, religious and ethnic differentiations and that which underlies them – the Law – are identified in effect as “the old things” that have now “passed away,” giving place to the new creation ( Cor :)’ (Martyn : –). It is probably right, that is, to say that Paul’s focus was largely on the ethnic and religious issues; on Martyn’s view, it would certainly not be right to say that Paul had no theology which addressed the ontological (cosmological) and social implications of the baptismal formula.

Galatians :–

Paul Contrasts the Galatians’ Present State as Christians with Their Former Lives

Overview This section continues Paul’s account of the contrast between the former state of his readers and their present state in the gospel, which they are endangering by listening to the Jewish Christians. Here the contrast is expounded in terms of an analogy with those who are under different forms of bondage: slaves on the one hand and heirs on the other. So long as they are minors, the heirs are no better off than the slaves; but once they have entered into their inheritance, they would hardly wish to go back to their former state of bondage. Why, then, do they observe days and seasons? Paul urges them to imitate him, and reminds them of their great devotion to him in their first encounter, expressing his own anguish as he wrestles with his hopes and anxieties for them, like a mother in Galatians Through the Centuries, First Edition. John Riches. © 2013 John Riches. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Galatians :–



labour longing for the birth of her child: only here his longing is that Christ will be formed in them. While the place of this passage in Paul’s overall argument is not seriously in doubt, there are nevertheless details which are not clear, and indeed considerable internal tensions in what is being said. If the Christian believers are being compared to minors waiting to come into their inheritance, where their father is presumably loosely compared with God, what sense does it make to speak of their former state as one in which they served those who were not gods? Does this metaphor apply to those who were formerly Jewish or Gentile or, indeed, in some way, both? Paul also freely mixes his metaphors about the way in which the Galatians’ salvation is to be understood: is it like coming into their inheritance, being released from bondage to elemental powers, or (even after their having embraced the gospel) having Christ formed in them? Additionally, the passage also raises issues about the observation of special days, about the nature of the incarnation, even about the virgin birth and the doctrine of Christ. While the church fathers made free use of this passage in their christological debates,* we shall focus our attention on the way in which the Galatians’ former state is presented.



The Galatians’ Former State

Dualist readings This passage must have been music to Marcion’s ears, with its contrasts between the life of slavery under the weak and beggarly spirits and the life of sonship and adoption, once believers know God or are known of God. Most of the text is known to have formed part of Marcion’s Apostolicon, and there is little reason to doubt that he included it all. For Harnack (: *), Tertullian’s discussion (Marc. .) suggests that Marcion omitted the negative in v.  to read it as ‘you worshipped those who were physical gods’, which would suggest a world under the Creator God populated by nature gods (this is contra ANF ., which includes the negative). Irenaeus (AH ..; ANF .), indicates that the Valentinians used this text to suggest that the creator of the world was ‘the fruit of a defect, and describe him as being of an animal nature, and as not knowing that Power which is above him’. Gnostics like Theodotus take the metaphor of the slaves and the sons to refer to two distinct modes of existence: that of the pneumatics (spiritual

* For further details see www.bbibcomm.net



Galatians :–

ones) and that of the psychics. The psychics are enslaved to the demiurge and his archons, who have forged the elements of Sophia’s passion into the ‘weak and impoverished elements’ of cosmic creation (Exc. ex Theod. .–.). Nevertheless, the psychics can become sons of God by adoption, according to Heracleon (Origen, Comm. Joh. .; : ). It is for this purpose that the saviour ‘came into existence from woman’. Theodotus takes the woman in Gal : to refer to the woman above, whose passions became creation . . . because of her the savior came to draw us from the passion and adopt us to himself. As long as we were children only of the female, as of a shameful syzygy, we were incomplete, immature, senseless, weak, and formless, brought forth like abortions . . . But when we have received form from the savior, we became the children of a husband and a bridechamber. (Exc. ex Theod. .–, in Pagels : )

The fundamental problem posed by Marcion to orthodox interpreters is how to interpret v. : ‘so with us; when we were children, we were slaves’. If the ‘we’ here is taken as referring to Gentiles and Jews, then there is clearly an implication that the God of the Law was one of the elemental spirits. Tertullian (Marc. .; ANF .) clearly takes the ‘we’ to refer to Gentiles. The problem with this is that, in the context of Paul’s argument with the Galatians over the observation of the Law, v.  seems to refer to Jewish festivals and sabbaths. Tertullian argues, first, that the error here is the superstition of supposing the elements to be gods; second, that it is the creator God himself who has ordained that the rites of the old Law be abolished (citing Isa :, ; Am :; Hos :).

Patristic and medieval interpretations Augustine, too, is much concerned with the question: who are the ones compared to minors, who before their majority live like slaves? How could this analogy apply to Jews who under the Law worshipped the one God? He prefers to read the passage as complementary to chapter : there the Jews are described as having been under a guardian, here Gentiles are said to have been ‘under the elements of this world’ as ‘guardians and trustees‘ under whom the Gentiles were virtual slaves’ (Augustine : ). This scheme poses difficulties when he reaches vv. –, for if the observation of days and months is linked with their turning back to ‘weak and needy elements to which you want to be enslaved again as you were before’, then it would seem to refer to pagan ceremonies and astrological practices, and this, as Augustine recognizes, is inconsistent with the rest of the letter, where it is Jewish Christians who are undermining the Galatians. Here, however, ‘he appears to be speaking to those who were

Galatians :–



trying to return to the superstitions of the Gentiles’. It certainly cannot refer to their turning back to circumcision! However, this would appear to be ‘suddenly and rashly trying to twist Paul’s cause for writing into something else’, and so he proposes an alternative way of taking it. What they are being encouraged to practise is the slavish observation of Jewish days and festivals, ‘their carnal observation of the sabbath and new moon, the month of new corn, and the seventh year’ (Augustine : ). This in turn raises a question about the identity of the ‘elements that by nature are not gods’, under which they had been enslaved as guardians and trustees (:). Augustine, scenting Manichaean and Gnostic dualism, argues that Paul’s assertion that the elements are trustees implies, no matter whether they were celestial bodies or creatures such as animals or even fallen angels and their prince, the devil, that they were nevertheless under the providence of God. In this way justice is accomplished even through those who do not want what is good (Augustine : ). This is a somewhat desperate, if creative, attempt to salvage some coherence out of this difficult passage. Chrysostom, unlike Augustine, takes Paul, in the first place, to be addressing Christians who were formerly Jews, referring specifically to the level of understanding enjoyed by them before they had attained faith. They had allowed their lives to be dictated by the sun and moon, which determine the timing of religious days of observance such as new moons and sabbaths. In this way they had subjected God, who is Lord of creation, to the rule of his creatures, the sun and moon. However, according to Chrysostom, in v.  he turns to Gentiles and accuses them of idolatry because of their return to the ‘weak and beggarly elements’ to which they were previously in bondage. Nonetheless, whereas Augustine had seen the Galatians’ teachers here as pagans, Chrysostom sees them as Jewish Christians preaching not only circumcision but also special days. Aquinas takes the whole of chapter  to be a discussion of the ‘preëminence of grace’. Having so far demonstrated the shortcoming (defectum) of the Law, he now proceeds to enlarge on the worth and excellence of grace. The figure of the heir is thus taken to refer both to the Jewish people and to Christ, as it is an image which expresses both their temporary subjection and smallness and also their potential dignity. Aquinas offers three possible readings of Paul’s phrase ‘serving under the elements of the world’: (i) serving ‘under the Law which promised temporal things . . . and threatened temporal punishments’; (ii) being instructed in the elements of belief as a preliminary to being brought to full knowledge (:); (iii) observing days, months and sabbaths, though not worshipping them but ‘under them serv[ing] and worshipp[ing] God’ (Aquinas : –; : –). While Paul is thus principally addressing those who were Jews before they believed, Aquinas allows that Paul in v.  is speaking to the Gentile Christians in Galatia, lest they should feel excluded



Galatians :–

(Aquinas : ; : ). As to the passage in vv. –, Aquinas entertains the possibility that it might refer to the Galatians’ returning to idolatry, but ultimately rejects this in favour of their taking up the observance of the Law. But this requires some explanation. How could the Galatians, whom he clearly regards as predominantly Gentile in origin, return to the Law? His explanation, not unlike Augustine’s, is that the Jewish cult lies mid-way between that of the Christians and that of the Gentiles. ‘[F]or the Gentiles worshipped the elements as though they were living things; the Jews, on the other hand, did not serve the elements but served God under the elements, inasmuch as they rendered worship to God by the observances of bodily elements . . . but Christians serve God under Christ, i.e., in the faith of Christ’ (Aquinas : ; : ), an interesting kind of history of religions account of the matter. On such a view, the Gentiles were reverting, but not quite all the way, to their earlier mode of worship. This progressive understanding of religious development (which is to be seen in the context of Aquinas’s engagement with Islam and his – and medieval Jewish and Islamic theologians’ – openness to Greek philosophy) is seen in Aquinas’s treatment of the heir analogy, where the Jews’ status under the Law is compared to that of minors (‘because of the imperfection of knowledge’, Aquinas : ; : ), in a manner reminiscent of John Chrysostom. But even within the Jewish people Aquinas wishes to distinguish between those who observed the Law out of fear and desire for the temporal rewards which it offered and those who ‘were true sons and heirs’ who ‘used them for love of the spiritual goods they prefigured’ (Aquinas : –; : –). This progression from the worship of God through the elements of this world to the true understanding of the spiritual things which they prefigure is necessary ‘because such an order is in harmony with human nature which is led from sensible to intelligible things’ (Aquinas : ; : ), an opinion which has clear roots in Aristotle.

Luther Luther, like Aquinas, takes this passage to refer to the former state of the Jews under the Mosaic Law and so to continue the argument in chapter . Those who were heirs were formerly under bondage to the Law until the time of Christ, when they entered into their inheritance and became sons and daughters of God by adoption. This means that he takes the negative language which Paul uses to describe the Galatians’ former state to apply to life under the Law, which, in turn, Luther universalizes as applying to the experience of those who have not yet grasped

Galatians :–



the doctrine of justification by faith. Insofar as people live without belief in Christ (unlike, that is, the Old Testament patriarchs), then the experience of living under the Law is indeed one of bondage to ‘the terrors of sin, wrath and the judgement of God’, in order that those who so suffer should not trust to ‘our own righteousness or to the righteousness of the law, seeing that the law, in his best and principal use, can do nothing else but accuse our consciences, increase sin, threaten death and eternal damnation’. At least in this use, Luther is in no doubt that, once Christ has come, the former ‘prison and bondage of the law’ ceases, and believers cease to be ‘servants, shut under the law, destitute of grace, faith, and all the gifts of the Holy Ghost’ (Luther : ; LW .–). A world under the Law ‘(because it is the kingdom of the devil) is nothing else but a certain puddle of sin, of death, hell, and of all evils which the fearful, sorrowful and heavy hearted’ (as opposed to ‘the secure and careless contemners’) ‘do feel’ (Luther : ; LW :). This leads Luther, with, as he sees it, the full backing of Paul, to some of his most extravagant language against the Law: ‘Here, therefore, if thou be wise, banish this stuttering and stammering Moses far from thee with his law, and in any wise let not his terrors and threatenings move thee. Here let him utterly be suspected unto thee as an heretic, as an excommunicate and condemned person, worse than the Pope and the devil himself, and therefore not to be heard or obeyed in any case’ (Luther : ; LW .). For a ‘sinner, being weak and poor himself ’ to turn to the law is for ‘two sick and feeble beggars [to] meet together, of whom the one is not able to help and heal the other, but rather molesteth and troubleth the other’. Nevertheless, just at the point where Luther seems to have dismissed the Law from the life of the believer altogether, there comes a more positive note: ‘We, as being strong in Christ, will gladly serve the law, not the weak and beggarly, but the mighty and rich law, that is to say, so far forth as it hath power and dominion over the body; for then we serve the law, but only in our body and outward members, and not in our conscience’ (Luther : ; LW .). As the immediate qualification makes clear, for Luther, this is a matter which has very clear limits, relating to the public life of the Christian only, in which he/she may freely obey the laws of the state. It does not impinge on the essential sphere of the conscience, where true Christian liberty is to be found (Gal :). The precise nature of this distinction will trouble Lutheran theologians for centuries to come. In this context, it is interesting to see how Luther treats Paul’s phrase the ‘elements of this world’. He takes it to refer directly to the Law, specifically to ‘the outward letters and traditions written in a certain book’. Here even Luther has qualms: ‘although Paul call the whole law the rudiments of the world (as may appear by what I have said before), yet . . . principally he speaketh thus in contempt of ceremonial laws; which although they profit never so much . . . [are]



Galatians :–

only for the use of this present life, but not to justify or save before God. . . . Wherefore the law of Moses giveth nothing but worldly things; that is to say, it doth only shew civilly and spiritually the evils that be in the world’ (Luther : –; LW .–). Again, Luther makes a sharp distinction between the world of civil action and obedience and the inner world of conscience, which is properly the place where the soul encounters God in judgement and in grace.

Calvin Whereas Luther allegorized the notion of the time of Christ’s coming to refer to his entering into the life of an individual (without denying Christ’s coming in the flesh), Calvin, while not denying that Christ does indeed enter into the life of individual Christians, takes the present passage with its image of the son and heir as explicating the ‘difference between us and the ancient people’. Where he takes more serious issue with Luther is over the question of whether one can use this passage to distinguish ‘between the time of unbelief and the calling to faith’, which he denies. The question is, rather, ‘Since the Church of God is one, how comes it that our condition is different from that of the Israelites?’ (Calvin : ). How can one explain the fact that though both share the same faith, the Israelites are in servitude under the Law, while the Christians enjoy freedom? Paul, explains Calvin, is comparing ‘the Israelite church which existed under the old covenant and the Christian Church’ in order to discern the points of agreement and difference. Calvin raises three points: (i) both have the hope of the same inheritance: ‘the spiritual blessing promised to Abraham belongs to them no less than to us’; (ii) both have the same freedom of conscience: ‘[t]hey so bore the yoke of the law on their shoulders that they worshipped God with a free spirit’; (iii) ‘they held the same doctrine as ourselves, were joined with us in the true unity of the faith, placed reliance with us on the one Mediator, called on God as their Father, and were governed by the same Spirit.’ This leads Calvin to a strong assertion of identity: ‘the difference between us and the ancient fathers lies not in substance but in accidents.’ Only in inessentials, the ‘ceremonies and all that regime in which we differ’, is there a distinction, so that ‘in all the chief points of the testament or covenant we agree’ (Calvin : ). It is hard to imagine a stronger statement of the continuity between the two ‘churches’, just as it is hard to imagine a reading more difficult to reconcile with Paul’s language of slavery and bondage when taken to refer to the Jewish people. However, similar difficulties lie in any attempt to argue that Paul’s theology is a form of covenantal nomism. The differences for Calvin lie more in the difference in the two commu-

Galatians :–



nities’ development: the age of the Patriarchs and Moses was ‘the infancy of the Church’. With Christ’s coming the church has come to maturity. Calvin notes an apparent contradiction with Paul’s reference shortly afterward in : to Christians as children who need to grow into adults, but insists that this is applied to individuals and not, as here, to the universal condition of the church in its different stages of development, specifically to ‘the economy of God in which they were governed’. Here Chrysostom’s notion of paidagōgia returns: it was a ‘system of instruction for children . . . however much knowledge they were given, it partook of the nature of the period, for a dark cloud continually rested on the revelation which they had’. Christians, then, have greater clarity of knowledge and this is a powerful argument against the papacy, which justifies its impressive popular ceremonies on the grounds that the ‘masses of the people are far more ignorant that they were among the Israelites and that therefore many more helps are needed’ (Calvin : ). It is, however, hardly supportive of Calvin’s view that the Law is there for Christians ‘to learn with greater truth and certainty what that will of the Lord is which they aspire to follow’ (Instit. II..). The difference in tone and theology between the two Reformers is certainly strikingly illustrated in their interpretations of this passage: Luther’s existential interpretation with its allegorization of Christ’s coming to refer to the inner dynamics of the believer’s life contrasts starkly with Calvin’s almost detached account of the different economies of salvation in Israel and the Christian church with their underlying unity. This strong assertion of the continuity between Israel and the church, indicated by Calvin’s use of the word ‘church’ to refer to both institutions, and of the essential agreement between the old and new covenants (‘In all chief points of the testament or covenant we agree’, Calvin : ), leads, on the one hand, to theological moves of great consequence in relation to the understanding of Law; on the other, to considerable tensions within Calvin’s own thought, when he comes to consider the distinctive character of Christian faith and experience, such that it is by no means surprising that his subsequent followers should develop a federal theology which would lay much greater stress on the differences between the two covenants.

Perkins Perkins follows Calvin in seeing this section as being concerned with a comparison of the relative states of freedom and bondage of Jews and Christians. The argument of vv. –, says Perkins, is a syllogism, where the major premiss (‘If the time of our bondage be ended, and the full time of our libertie come,



Galatians :–

then are wee sonnes, and not servants’, Perkins : ) is unexpressed, and the minor premiss, viz. that the time of bondage is ended and of liberty come, is confirmed (a) by the fact that their liberty had been procured by Christ and (b) that they have received the spirit of adoption. Thus it follows that they are indeed sons and not servants. What, then, of the relative states of freedom and bondage of Jews and Christians? Perkins in the main follows Calvin, showing, however, some reluctance to credit the Jews with the degree of freedom and spiritual insight which Calvin had attributed to them. The people of God in the Old Testament are held to be ‘in bondage in respect of us: because they were subject to more lawes than we are, and they wanted [i.e. lacked] the fruition of the libertie which we enjoy. . . . For otherwise liberty in conscience from hel, death, and sinne, they had even as we now have’ (contra Calvin: ‘More particularly, they had been taught about the free pardon of sins, and their consciences were delivered from the tyranny of sin and death’; : ). Hand in hand with this goes the belittling of the importance of the educative role of the Law. The Law of Moses is called the ‘rudiments of the world’, ‘because Jewry was as it were, a little schoole set up in a corner of the world; the law of Moses was as it were, an a, b, c, or Primar, in which Christ was revealed to the world, in darke and obscure manner, specially to the Jews’ (Perkins : ). In the light of the greater revelation which has been given to the Christian Church, all Christians are called to be teachers, and yet, Perkins bewails, ‘God knowes, the most are very babes’ (Perkins : ). This belittling of the Law, in a manner strongly reminiscent of Chrysostom, is surprising in view of his extensive use of it to derive ethical principles and injunctions for his contemporary Christians, as, for example, in his views on witchcraft and adultery (p. ).

Hilgenfeld For Hilgenfeld this passage, written from the ‘height of Christian consciousness’ which had been reached at the end of chapter  (sons of Abraham and heirs of the promise), principally contrasts the present state of responsibility and independence (Mündigkeit und Selbständigkeit) with their previous state of tutelage (Unmündigkeit; Hilgenfeld : ). The contrast, that is to say, is between pre-Christian humanity in its bondage to the heavenly powers and humanity as it achieves its true identity (Bestimmung) in the sonship of God. This view of pre-Christian religion in its relation to the Christian religion is the ‘quintessence of the dogmatic section of the epistle in chapters  and  . . . The more the tension between the pre-Christian and the Christian is heightened, the less we should be surprised if precisely at this point Judaism’s specific

Galatians :–



advantage in relation to pagan religion (Heidenthum) recedes very much into the background’ (Hilgenfeld : ). This provides a very nice resolution of the puzzle which has so divided commentators as to the referent of the sons in this passage. The sons, who in their minority were treated like slaves, are all of pre-Christian humanity viewed from a Christian perspective, Jews and Gentiles together.

Lightfoot Lightfoot sees vv. – as an extension of the image of sonship, introduced in the previous section and there linked to the notion of the paidagōgos. The comparison is between the son in his minority and the ‘state of the world before the Gospel’, and Lightfoot believes that Paul includes the Gentiles in this comparison, ‘all having more or less been subject to a system of positive ordinances, and so far gone through a disciplinary training’ (Lightfoot : ). Lightfoot thus takes the ‘elements of the world’ to refer to the elementary teaching which Jews and Gentiles alike had received. This differs from the sense of ‘physical elements’, especially as referring to the ‘observance of days and seasons, regulated by the heavenly bodies’, found in Ps. Clem. Hom. x. , , Justin, Apol. II, A and Dial. C. Trypho, c that the majority of the Fathers assumed here (Hilary, Pelagius, Chrysostom, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Ep. ad Diogn. ). He rejects Victorinus’s and Augustine’s reading of the passage to refer to the Gentiles alone (on the basis of the ‘we’, which he believes must include the Jews; Lightfoot : ), and traces this trend in the Fathers to the influence of ‘a passage in the Praedicatio Petri, quoted in Clem. Alex. Strom. iv, Orig. In Joann. iv.  . . . in which the worship of the Jews is classed with that of the heathen, inasmuch as, professing to know God, they were by this observance of days and seasons’ worshipping angels and archangels, the month and the moon. Such a reading is more Alexandrian than Pauline, and Lightfoot sees here the influence of Origen. By contrast, Jerome, Gennadius and Primasius take Lightfoot’s preferred sense of ‘elementary teaching’. Lightfoot comments: ‘St. Paul seems to be dwelling still on the rudimentary character of the law, as fitted for an earlier stage in the world’s history’ (Lightfoot : ; cf. too Col :; :). This essentially educational view of the Law, which has intriguing similarities with Hilgenfeld’s view, is underlined by Lightfoot’s treatment of ‘the fulness of time’. This is said both from God’s point of view, in that he had foreordained the time at which the Messiah should come, and also from the point of view of the recipient: ‘The Gospel was withheld until the world had arrived at mature age: law had worked out its educational purpose and now was superseded’. The work of the Law had been not only negative, deepening the conviction of sin and



Galatians :–

showing ‘the inability of all existing systems to bring men near to God’. It was also positive: the Law had led to a ‘moral and spiritual expansion, which rendered the world more capable of apprehending the Gospel than it would have been at an earlier age’. While this is said primarily of the Mosaic Law, ‘the whole context shows that the Gentile converts of Galatia are also included, and that they too are regarded as having undergone an elementary discipline, up to a certain point analogous to that of the Jews’ (Lightfoot : ). To read Paul in this way is, however, to raise difficult questions about the relation of the Law to pagan rites and regulations, or, as Lightfoot puts it, of the relation of ‘the divinely ordained law which he elsewhere describes as “holy and just and good” (Rom. vii.), and those degraded heathen systems which he elsewhere reprobates as “fellowship with devils” ( Cor x.)’. These questions are raised particularly clearly when Paul upbraids the Galatians, who are beginning to observe Jewish rituals, with ‘returning to the weak and beggarly elements’ which they once worshipped, v. . Lightfoot’s answer is to say that Judaism and heathenism are to be considered in both their spiritual and ritualistic elements. The highest form of heathen ritual corresponds to Jewish ritual; but the spiritual elements in Judaism are far higher; the spiritual element in heathenism, by contrast, was ‘wholly bad’. Heathen religions ‘were profligate and soul-destroying, were the prompting of devils’. Lest such an evaluation of the spiritual aspects of Judaism might seem to place it alongside Christianity, Lightfoot asserts: ‘Christianity has appropriated all that was spiritual in its predecessor. The Mosaic dispensation was a foreshadowing, a germ of the Gospel: and thus, when Christ came, its spiritual element was of necessity extinguished or rather absorbed by its successor. Deprived of this, it was a mere mass of lifeless ordinances, differing only in degree, not in kind, from any other ritualistic system’ (Lightfoot : ). The consequences of taking this passage to refer primarily or wholly to the former life of Jews are clear: a deeply negative view of Judaism.

Twentieth-century readings Schweitzer reads this passage in an apocalyptic framework, albeit one which has been significantly refashioned by Paul. The Law was given by angels through the hand of a mediator, Moses. (A mediator is needed only where there are two groups of people; there would be no need for a mediator between God, as a unity, and Israel, Gal :–.) Thus, when Paul speaks about the Galatians being under the elements, he is developing a current Jewish view about the Gentiles. ‘Philo and, still earlier, about  B.C., the Wisdom of Solomon (Wisd. xiii. ), assert that the heathen worship the Elements – Earth, Water, Air, Fire –

Galatians :–



as well as the stars. To this view, Paul gives the special turn that these beings are in reality Angels and stand behind the Jewish Law’ (Schweitzer : ). Sanders (: ) thinks that Paul’s understanding of the human plight cannot be read simply in apocalyptic terms: apocalyptic writers see the predicament of those within the covenant as one of oppression by opposing powers rather than of bondage or slavery. The notion of slavery to the body was widespread among Greek writers, but without the reference to opposing powers. Sanders comments: One finds, in a way, the Hellenistic tone of slavery and the apocalyptic scheme of opposing world powers. It might at first be thought that the combination of these two conceptions (slavery and opposing powers) is found in astrology, and it is noteworthy that in Galatians Paul explicitly formulates the plight of the nonChristian in terms of bondage to the astrological deities (Gal :). Yet astrology cannot offer the exhaustive explanation of Paul’s view, since it does not consider escape to be effected by the change of aeons. (Gal :; Sanders : )

Bultmann agrees that the elements here are probably to be taken as the ‘elemental spirits of the “kosmos”’, where this is one of the few places where ‘“kosmos” denotes the total world of creation’ (Bultmann : ). However, Paul employs such language principally to express a certain understanding of existence. The spirit powers represent the reality into which man is placed as one full of conflicts and struggle, a reality which threatens and tempts. Thus, through these mythological conceptions the insight is indirectly expressed that man does not have his life in his hand as if he were his own lord but that he is constantly confronted with the decision of choosing his lord. Beyond this, they also contain the conviction that natural man has always already decided against God, his true Lord, and has let the threatening and tempting world become lord over him. (Bultmann : )

Dunn declares that the debate over whether the ‘elements’ referred to in v.  are the elemental substances of which the world is composed, the elementary forms of religion, or the heavenly bodies regarded as divine powers, is largely misguided, and that Paul would have had all these three senses in mind. This was simply his way of ‘referring to the common understanding of the time that human beings lived their lives under the influence of or sway of primal and cosmic forces, however they were conceptualised’. However, Dunn does in fact offer his own rather precise view of how Paul viewed the subjection under which Jews had lived. [H]e clearly understood the law to be functioning in effect as one of these forces . . . This in fact was his great criticism of contemporary Judaism: that by treating



Galatians :–

the law as ruling over and marking out Israel exclusively, his fellow Jews were doing the very opposite of what they thought they were doing; instead of demonstrating God’s special preference for Israel, the law had become like (in the language of Jubilees) one of the spirits which God caused to rule over the other nations ‘so that they might lead them astray’. The reference to Jubilees : nicely explains the ambiguity of the ‘we’ in verse  and why the idea of the Galatians putting themselves under the law is equivalent to the idea of their reverting to their previous pagan religions. (Dunn : )

By saying that Paul viewed the Law as ‘functioning in effect’ as one of the forces under whose sway people lived, Dunn is effectively demythologizing Paul’s language at this point. It is the understanding and use of the Law by Paul’s Jewish contemporaries which turns it into an enslaving power, turning their lives into ones ‘dominated by fear of infringing its taboos and boundaries’ (Dunn : ). We are back in a tradition of interpretation which leads from Bultmann and Baur back to Luther.

Galatians :–

A Concluding Allegory The Nature of Paul’s Argument in This Section and Its Relation to the Argument of the Letter as a Whole

Paul here reaches the climax of the argument that has stretched from the end of the second chapter. Here in this section he concludes with an ‘allegory’ which is based on the Sarah/Hagar stories from Genesis –. Most commentators see this passage as forming the conclusion to the arguments that Paul has been making in support of his gospel and his main thesis, which is spelled out in :–. Verse  is seen both as the conclusion to the section :– and as the conclusion to the argument as a whole in :–: (Betz : ). There is, however, significant disagreement over the force of the argument here: whether it strengthens or indeed develops Paul’s arguments, or whether it is relatively weak, a mere ornament or rhetorical device for encouraging the Galatians. Galatians Through the Centuries, First Edition. John Riches. © 2013 John Riches. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Galatians :–

Among those who see the section as contributing to the development of Paul’s argument, Victorinus sees it as an attempt to persuade the Galatians from the same Law to which they have turned that it ‘was written in such a manner that it would relate to Christ’ (Victorinus : ). Chrysostom takes it as a development of Paul’s argument that the Galatians were sons of Abraham to show that ‘the Patriarch’s sons were not of equal dignity’; the Galatians were ‘sons in the same sense as he that was freeborn and noble’ (NPNF .). Among more recent interpreters, Lagrange argues that the new argument here is about the relationships between the two covenants (Lagrange : –). For Betz, it represents the sixth argument in the probatio of Paul’s propositio in :–. He argues that it should not be seen as the weakest argument in the series, but as one designed to encourage, rather than humiliate, his readers, by letting them ‘find the truth for themselves’ (Betz : ). Others offer a somewhat less positive assessment: Paul would have liked to finish the argument here, but adds the allegory to ‘move and persuade . . . especially the simple and ignorant’ (Luther : ; LW .). Calvin is similarly belittling: Paul ‘follows up his former teaching with a fine illustration ‘ (Calvin : ). For Lightfoot, it is an accessory to the argument, ‘representing in a lively form the teaching already enforced on other grounds’ (Lightfoot : ). Commentators also show very different degrees of enthusiasm for Paul’s use of allegory at this point. For Chrysostom, Paul is using the term in a non-standard sense, catachrestically; he stresses the typological character of the argument at this point: ‘this history not only declares that which appears on the face of it, but announces somewhat farther, whence it is called an allegory. And what hath it announced? No less than all the things now present’ (NPNF .). For Severianus, what Paul terms an allegory is more properly a ‘prophecy through works’ (Staab : ). Similarly, Luther (: : LW .) and Calvin attack those like Origen and Jerome, who have seized this occasion of twisting Scripture this way and that, away from the genuine sense. . . . Scripture, they say, is fertile and thus bears multiple meanings. I acknowledge that Scripture is the most rich and inexhaustible fount of all wisdom. But I deny that its fertility consists in the various meanings which anyone may fasten to it at his pleasure. Let us know, then, that the true meaning of Scripture is the natural and simple one (verum sensum scripturae, qui germanus est et simplex), and let us embrace and hold it resolutely. (Calvin : –)

Augustine, by contrast, sees this as a warrant for his own allegorical interpretations and develops the allegory to include Abraham’s sons by Keturah, who represent heresiarchs and schismatics, matters of great concern to him in North Africa:

Galatians :–



Now if someone has gained confidence from the Apostle’s very clear demonstration that these two sons are to be understood allegorically and also wishes to see in Keturah’s sons some figure of things to come – for these events involving such persons were not recorded under the guidance of the Holy Spirit for nothing – he will perhaps find that they signify heresies and schisms. (Augustine : )

In a similar vein, though restricting themselves to the senses drawn out by Paul, interpreters like Jerome assert that Paul is drawing out the more hidden or mysterious sense of the words of Moses: ‘A person listens to the law when, according to Paul, he looks not at its exterior but looks into its heart. A person does not listen to the law when, like the Galatians, he follows only its outer shell’ (PL . B). Erasmus changes the metaphor: ‘just as in man the mind, as ruler of the body, lies hidden under the heavy cover of the body, so under the story something deeper and more sublime lies concealed’ (Erasmus : ). Lightfoot, who, like Grotius (: ), draws attention to Philo’s allegorical treatment of Sarah and Hagar, distinguishes two senses of allegoroumena: ‘to speak in an allegory’ and ‘to treat or interpret as an allegory’. He suggests that ‘it is possible that St. Paul uses the word in this latter sense, referring to some recognized mode of interpretation’. Nevertheless, he, like the Antiochenes and the Reformers, wants to emphasize the typological character of Paul’s exegesis, ‘not denying the historical truth of the narrative, but superposing a secondary meaning’ (Lightfoot : ).

Interpretative Problems and Main Types of Interpretation There are a number of minor lexicographical problems in the text: how is sustoikei in v.  to be translated: ‘corresponds to’, ‘borders on’? What is the basis for Paul’s identification of Hagar with Sinai? More significant for explaining the varieties of interpretation offered by commentators is the complexity of Paul’s allegorical reading of the Sarah/Hagar story. Sarah, Abraham’s wife, is unable to bear him children and offers him instead her slave, Hagar, who bears him a son, Ishmael; subsequently, Sarah gives birth to Isaac, and Hagar and Ishmael are driven out. Problems arise as follows: () Is this a story of two sons (‘it is written Abraham had two sons’, v. ) or of two mothers (‘these women are two covenants’, v. )? () Paul draws out a number of points from the story: Hagar is the slave, she has a man, she gives birth normally/according to the flesh; Sarah is free, she is barren, she gives birth miraculously, according to divine promise. He also introduces a number of comparisons: Sarah = Jerusalem above; Hagar = Mount Sinai, the present Jerusalem. Which of these are seen as most important by interpreters? () Paul makes a – not very clear – identification of the mothers and their children: Hagar is in slavery with her children; Sarah



Galatians :–

is ‘our mother’. But who are ‘we’? Is Paul identifying specific groups/peoples with the two figures? In which case does ‘we’ refer to Jews who believe in Jesus as the Christ, to the church, to a particular section of the church (generally a more typological kind of reading)? Or is he speaking more allegorically, universally, identifying the children of each woman with certain universal modes of existence? One may very broadly classify interpretations as follows. There are those which () stress the contrast between the free woman and the slave and either (a) lay most emphasis on the contrast between specific historical groups/personages: Jews and the church of the Gentiles (Chrysostom, Bengel); Paul before and after conversion (Lightfoot) and/or (b) see this as a contrast between different modes of existence: those who are born in freedom/are slaves of sin (Ambrosiaster); those who hold to the particularistic religion of the Law/those who embrace ‘the absolute religion, the religion of the spirit and of freedom’ (Baur, Erasmus?, Luther); and those () which stress the contrast between the birth according to promise and that according to the flesh, reading this either (a) in terms of groups: the elect and the reprobate (Calvin); Jews and Christians (Ambrosiaster); the Sinai church and the ‘Holy Ghost Church’ (Watson) and/ or (b) see this in more universal terms: those born of the word/of the flesh (Luther); those in whom new spiritual life has been implanted/those still in a state of natural depravity (Watson). These interpretations are ideal types, and in practice, precisely because Paul allegorizes Jewish history, and because allegory does not restrict itself to making one dominant point but a number of often loosely related points, individual interpreters very often incorporate elements of a number of types of interpretation. Importantly, they seem to be able both to universalize the application, taking the story to refer to general modes of human existence, and also to particularize, seeing such modes of behaviour as being specifically associated with certain historical groups, Jews, Catholics, Turks, monks, etc. This latter mode of constructing the other in terms of stereotypes derived from the internal self-consciousness of the reader is particularly fateful.

Galatians :–: The Hagar/Sarah Story and Its Allegorization Patristic interpretations In what is a complex story, interpreters are unable to give equal attention to all its parts. There are those who emphasize the contrast between the mode of birth of the two sons, either according to the flesh or according to the promise;

Galatians :–



others emphasize the contrast between the free woman and the slave. Theodore links the allegory with Paul’s earlier arguments about justification through the Law and through grace, and then goes on to expound the differences between the two covenants, one which demands works which no one can achieve and the other which offers justification and eternal life by the grace of the Spirit which is in the believers (Theodore : –). By contrast, Ambrosiaster sees Ishmael’s birth as signifying the birth of the Jews, who are slaves of sin, while Isaac stands for Christians who are born in freedom, because they receive the remission of sins (Ambrosiaster : ). Chrysostom takes the passage as ‘proving that the Law itself was opposed to its being kept . . . So that, says he, you must abandon the Law, if you would obey it, for this is its own wish.’ His aim is to show that ‘present events were pictured aforetime’, and that the Galatians were not only Abraham’s sons ‘but sons in the same sense as he was freeborn and noble. Such is the power of Faith.’ For it is faith which is crucial here. His readers might doubt that any who were not physically descended from Abraham could be his sons, but this was true even of Isaac, who was ‘born not according to the order of nature, nor the law of marriage, nor the power of the flesh’, but was yet truly his son, fashioned by the Word of God. For this reason they can regard themselves more properly as Abraham’s sons than those who were physically descended from him (NPNF .–). Chrysostom then turns to the two mothers, who represent the two covenants. He takes the text to read ‘Now this Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia’, whereas other authorities omit ‘Hagar’ from v. . He explains that ‘Hagar’ is the word for Mount Sinai in the language of that country, and in this way links Hagar with the old covenant. He continues this geographical line of exposition by translating sustoikei as ‘border on’, is ‘contiguous’ with, Jerusalem. In this way the old covenant and the earthly Jerusalem are typified by the slave woman (something that can clearly be linked to the use of the slave metaphor at the beginning of the chapter). All this is contrasted with the ‘Jerusalem above who is free’, who stands for the church of the Gentiles as contrasted with the synagogue. Before the coming of Christ, the church of the Gentiles was ‘deprived of the knowledge of God’, now it has many more children than the synagogue, filling the ‘whole habitable world’. The comparison stresses not only the difference in numbers, but also the difference in the mode of birth: the members of the church of the Gentiles are born of the words of promise: ‘so also in our regeneration it is not nature, but the Words of God spoken by the Priest (the faithful know them), which in the Bath of water as in a sort of womb, form and regenerate him who is baptized’ (NPNF .–). This close identification of the two women with the two communities: the church of the Gentiles and the synagogue of the Jews, is widespread in the early church: it is found in Victorinus, who compares the two mothers ‘to the churches of the Jews and the Gentiles’



Galatians :–

(Victorinus : , see n. ). Jerome, who drew freely on Greek sources, says simply: ‘Practically everyone explains this passage by interpreting Hagar the slave as the Law and the Jewish people, and Sara the free woman as the church which is gathered from the Gentiles’ (PL .A). The long-term social and political consequences of such a reading can be seen from Chrysostom’s interpretation of the last two verses, with the quotation from Genesis :: ‘Cast out the handmaid and her son.’ Referring to Jewish persecution of Christians, Chrysostom promises comfort to come for the church: ‘Behold the reward of tyranny for a season, and of recklessness out of season! The son is cast out of his father’s house, and becomes, together with his mother, an exile and a wanderer’, a phrase which will have a long and dark history (NPNF :–). Among the Fathers, one of the strongest and most influential readings is given by Augustine, who, in Book XV of the City of God, focuses attention foremost on the contrast between the earthly and the heavenly Jerusalem. ‘One portion of the earthly city became an image of the heavenly city, not having a significance of its own, but signifying another city, and therefore serving, or “being in bondage”.’ Thus the actual, earthly city serves, ‘is in bondage to’ the heavenly city which it prefigures. Similarly Hagar and Sarah are ‘images of this image’. Sarah prefigures the free city. ‘[C]itizens are begotten to the earthly city by nature vitiated by sin, but to the heavenly city by grace freeing nature from sin,’ as is typified by the two sons, one ‘begotten by natural law, the other given by promise’ (Civ. Dei XV.; NPNF :). In this way Augustine treats the story as illustrative of the division of the world into two communities, the earthly and the heavenly, the fleshly and the spiritual, which go back to the creation of Adam and which can be traced through history, starting with Cain and Abel, who belonged respectively to the earthly and the heavenly. The one is rooted in this world, formed ‘by love of self, even to the contempt of God’; the other, heavenly city, is formed ‘by love of God, even to the contempt of self ’ (NPNF .–). Those who belong to the heavenly city are by grace strangers below and by grace citizens above. In this, God’s eternal purposes for creation are seen: ‘one is predestined to reign eternally with God, and the other to suffer eternal punishment with the devil’ (Civ. Dei XV.; NPNF :). As we shall see, Augustine can extend this communal reading of the allegory to Paul’s subsequent reflections on the conflict between the desires of the flesh and the spirit in :. Thus Augustine is able to blend together the different aspects of the allegory, slave/free, carnal/spiritual, of flesh/of promise under his ovearching concerning with the two communities which God has foreordained. The sons of the two mothers stand for different realizations of human existence, which in turn are embodied in different communities. It is interesting to compare the very different political theologies which are represented by Chrysostom’s and

Galatians :–



Augustine’s readings of this ‘allegory’. Chrysostom’s fits easily within a Byzantine imperial theology, which sees the emperor as God’s regent ruling over his world and which marginalizes those who do not belong to the children of Sarah, the baptized. The other sees this world and its rulers as fundamentally flawed, ruled by self-love, though with elements of justice and peace analogous to those in the city above (see the excellent introductions in O’Donovan and O’Donovan : –, –).

Thomas Aquinas Aquinas, like Chrysostom, sees the two sons as representing, on the one hand, the Jews who are children of Abraham according to the flesh and, on the other, the Gentiles, who imitate him by faith (Aquinas : ; : ). The mothers stand for two different covenants, the one which promises temporal things, the other, eternal things (Aquinas : ; : ). At this point, Aquinas departs sharply from Augustine: ‘Now there is a two-fold city of God: the one of the earth, called the earthly Jerusalem, and the other of Heaven called the heavenly Jerusalem. Furthermore, men were made citizens of the earthly city through the Old Testament, but of the heavenly through the New’ (Aquinas : ; : ). The Church, the heavenly city, is certainly not something which distinguishes the descendants of Abel from those of Cain, who built an earthly city. In the rich series of mystical readings which follow in Aquinas’s discussion of the passage it is interesting to note his treatment of the fruitfulness of the barren Sarah: ‘for many are the children of the desolate, more than of her that hath a husband.’ By Abraham’s abandoning of sexual intercourse with Sarah, ‘we are given to understand that the Church of the Gentiles was left desolate by Christ, because Christ had not yet come; and that the Church Triumphant was desolate of men, for whom no means of entry was open’. The many children she subsequently bears are ‘due to the coming of the spouse, namely, Christ, by Whom she had been left desolate, not by want of love, but because the bearing of children had been delayed’ (Aquinas : ; : ). It might seem, then, that Aquinas was advocating the same strict distinction between Jews by birth and baptized Gentiles as Chrysostom. The matter is more complicated: in the first place, he points out, fairly enough, that the faithful brethren include Jews and Gentiles. Secondly, he takes the story as an allegory, interpreting it mystically, rather than typologically, so laying less stress on its historical character. ‘The children of Abraham according to the flesh are, literally, the Jewish people; but, mystically, the ones who come to the faith for the sake of the carnal and temporal goods.’ The sons according to the promise



Galatians :–

are, moreover, distinguished from the sons of the flesh by the fact that they are persecuted by those of the flesh. This raises a question: in what sense were they or are they persecuted? Aquinas points to Acts as evidence of Jewish persecution of the early Christians, adding ‘and they would do the same even now if they were able’. But he opens it up much wider: ‘those who are carnal persecute spiritual men in the Church even as to the body; those, namely, who seek glory and temporal gain in the Church’. And he quotes a gloss which says that ‘all who seek from the Lord earthly aggrandizement in the Church pertain to this Ismael’ (Aquinas : ; : ; cf. Peter Lombard PL :C). And he introduces (from his own experience with the Cathars?) a further question. The ‘heretics whom we persecute say that they are the ones born according to the spirit and we according to the flesh’. Aquinas quickly distinguishes two different kinds of persecution: that in which a good person persecutes some to lead them back to the good; and that in which a bad person tries to lead someone astray (Aquinas : ; : ). It is clear that, just as Chrysostom’s account of this passage was strongly influenced by his situation in Antioch, confronted with a strong Jewish community attractive to his followers, so too here, Aquinas’s application of the allegory bears the marks of his own times.

Luther The former Augustinian friar Luther is similarly interested in the generation of two sorts of communities. For him the allegory is first and foremost an allegory of the two different ‘sorts of people who are represented by Ishmael and Isaac’. These types are further identified by the apostle with Sinai, the Law and the synagogue on the one hand, and with the church and the gospel, on the other. Precisely because Abraham is seen as ‘a figure of God’ (Luther : ; LW .), the historical elements of the story are thoroughly allegorized: the ‘sorts of people’ (Luther : ; LW .) which God creates are no longer simply identified with two particular historical communities stemming from Abraham, but with all those who conform to the two types. Here Luther makes free and creative use of the citation of Isaiah, ‘Rejoice, thou barren that bearest no children . . .’ ‘The law being the husband of the fruitful woman, that is to say, of the Synagogue, begetteth very many children. For men of all ages, not only idiots, but also the wisest and the best, do neither see nor know any other righteousness than the righteousness of the law’ (Luther : ; LW .). And he lists under such children of the Law those who follow the traditions of men and the laws of the Pope. All these will become barren and will be cast out of the house, while the children of Sarah, of the gospel and of the promise will inherit.

Galatians :–



Like Augustine, Luther is concerned with the implications of such a sharp contrast between the two peoples for the political sphere. While the Christian is free from the Law and the political laws of Moses are abolished, this does not mean that believers are ‘exempt from the obedience of all politic laws’ (Rom ;  Pet ; Luther : ; LW .). It is not that the heavenly kingdom, the heavenly Jerusalem, is an entirely future state: it is present here in this world, and its blessings are quite distinct from those of the earthly kingdom. The earthly blessing is to have a good civil government, both in commonweals and families; to have children, peace, riches, fruits of the earth, and other corporal commodities. The heavenly blessing is to be delivered from the law, sin and death; to be justified and quickened to live, to have peace with God . . . (Luther : ; LW .)

The distinction between the earthly Jerusalem and the heavenly, spiritual Jerusalem leads Luther, that is to say, to posit two different types of communities in the world: those who live according to laws of whatever kind, which is everyone so far as they are members of a civil society; those who are children of the promise, who by grace are spiritually free. Thus, while his reading of the allegory takes its starting point in the distinction between the synagogue and the church, its outworking ultimately brings him to a point where there is no longer a contrast between different religious communities, whether Jews, Turks, papists or Lutherans, but ultimately one between all forms of human society governed by law on the one hand and the church as the society of true believers, begotten of the Word, on the other. And this contrast then problematizes the identity of those who are children of Sarah. It is no longer a matter of membership of a particular community with well-defined boundaries. Here it is a question of belief, of bondage to or freedom from the Law: ‘But in great terrors and in the agony of death, when the conscience wrestleth with the judgement of God, it is the hardest thing of all others to say with a sure and steadfast hope: I am not the son of Hagar but of Sarah; that is to say, the law belongeth nothing unto me, for Sarah is my mother, who bringeth forth free children and heirs, and not servants’ (Luther : ; LW .).

Calvin Augustine’s emphasis on election also constitutes an important theme in readings in the Calvinist tradition. For Calvin, the vital distinction is between Ishmael, who is born according to the flesh, naturally, and Isaac, who, by contrast, is born by grace, which Calvin equates with election by God (Calvin : ). Calvin cannot, as we have seen, make a simple separation between



Galatians :–

the people of Israel and the church. Both are for him communities which experience God’s grace and Law. To divide the two covenants in terms of Law and grace would be to run the danger of a Marcionite dualism. For him, the two mothers represent different doctrines by which people in the church of God (which includes the people of the old covenant) are taught: the one legal, the other evangelical. The difficulty with this is that it seems to make the prophets and other believers before Christ into sons of Hagar, for they were clearly taught by the Law, not the gospel. In order to avoid this conclusion, Calvin has to introduce a distinction: there is a correct attitude to the Law and a false one. The prophets lived under the slavery of the Law but ‘inwardly they were free in the sight of God’ (‘francs intérieurement devant Dieu’, : ), ‘their slavish birth by the law did not prevent them having Jerusalem for their mother in spirit’. By contrast, those who ‘cleave to the bare law and do not know it as a schoolmaster to bring them to Christ, but rather make it a barrier against coming to Him, are the Ishmaelites born to slavery’ (Calvin : ). This then leaves him with the further problem that, on his view, such people are sons of the covenant and part of the church. Calvin’s reply is less than satisfying: ‘I reply, they are not strictly God’s children but are degenerate and spurious, and are disclaimed by God, whom they falsely call their Father. They are regarded as in the Church, not because they are members of it in reality but because for a time they usurp a place and deceive men by the mask they wear’ (Calvin : –). Clearly, it is principally Catholics who Calvin has in mind, as is confirmed by his comments a little later. The heavenly Jerusalem is present on earth and is the mother of true believers; the mother of the Papists ‘is an adulteress, who brings forth into death the children of the devil’. And he compares them unfavourably with the synagogue of Satan (Calvin : ). It is relatively clear what drives Calvin’s reading in this difficult passage: underlying his exegesis is the notion of an invisible church, to be found in both the old and the new covenant comprised of those born of the Spirit who, whether through the teaching of the Law, spiritually understood, or through the gospel, respond to God’s gracious call and election. In this way, Ishmael’s taunting, ‘persecuting’ of Isaac becomes the type of Jewish persecution of the early church and the undermining of our calling ‘by the mockeries of the ungodly’, which is worse than physical persecutions, ‘for how much worse is it that the grace of the divine adoption should be made void than that this frail life should be taken from us?’ (Calvin : ). Interestingly, here Calvin has less in mind the Catholic Church’s persecution of the Reformed, than the taunts of the ‘Epicureans’, those who seek ‘to root out the remembrance of Christ, or to expose it to the jeers of the rabble’ (Calvin : ). It is perhaps not surprising that in all the discussion of persecution, and despite the fact that Calvin’s own reading has identified the sons of Hagar with the Jewish people, there is no

Galatians :–



discussion of Christian persecution of the Jews. Calvin’s own allegorization of the passage allows him to move quickly to the taunts of the Epicureans. Strikingly, while Luther’s reading internalizes the contrast between those who are born of Hagar and of Sarah as one between those who live by the Law and by the gospel, for Calvin, this becomes more a matter of the distinction between the elect and the reprobate, those who live out of the doctrines of the church, both legal and evangelical, which are no longer opposed as in Luther. Rather, the distinction (even though Calvin acknowledges that it is not actually made explicitly in this passage) is between those who use properly and those who abuse God’s doctrine; the distinction lies then, properly between the Patriarchs and the Jews who abuse the Law and again between the true believers and those like the Catholics and Epicureans who despise the promises of the gospel. Calvin’s insistence on emphasizing the historical references in the text, however, constantly leads him to identify these different groups with particular historical communities, even if the true church remains invisible. It is interesting to compare Augustine and Calvin at this point. While Augustine is an uninhibited allegorizer, it is in fact he who seeks to trace the course of the heavenly city through history, placing Sarah and Hagar, Isaac and Ishmael, in a line which extends from Abel and Cain down to the present, each of them forming part of a community which reaches back to the very beginnings. For Calvin, they are figures of the present conflicts within the church (and between church and synagogue) and can be made to correspond to the historical figures only with difficulty. This is doubtless to be explained in terms of the ambiguities of Paul’s own interpretation: identifying the slave woman who is cast out with the old covenant implies a more negative understanding of the Law than Paul would on other occasions allow. On the other hand, the links which Paul makes between Ishmael and flesh, bondage, Sinai, earthly/present Jerusalem, persecuting the church, all clearly imply a very negative understanding of the Hagarenes.

Perkins If Calvin refused the invitation to discuss the nature of the two covenants in this context, fearing that it would lead to too sharp a contrast between them and instead stressing that it was the abuse of the old covenant which Paul had in view here, Perkins, the precursor of later Calvinist federal theology, has no such hesitations. After some preliminary discussions, notably of Abraham’s polygamous relations with Sarah and Hagar, which Perkins ascribes partly to a ‘desire in the Patriarkes to multiply their posterity, that if it were possible, the Messias might descend of their line’; partly to the weight of common custom, which bred ignorance ‘wherby that which was indeed a sinne, was esteemed no sinne’



Galatians :–

(Perkins : ), Perkins moves to the consideration of the two covenants: of works and of grace, which are signified by the two mothers, ‘one promising life eternall to him that doth all things contained in the law: the other to him that turnes and beleeves in Christ’. Here there is none of the concern, discernible in Calvin, with avoiding the Marcionite trap: the covenants are two, sundry waies. The law, or covenant of workes, propounds the bare iustice of God, without mercy: the covenant of grace, or the Gospel, reveales both the justice and mercy of God, or the justice of God giving place to his mercy. Secondly, the law requires of us inward and perfect righteousnesse, both for nature and action: the Gospel propounds unto us an imputed justice present in the person of the Mediatour. Thirdly, the law promiseth life upon condition of works: the Gospel promiseth remission of sinnes and life everlasting upon condition that we rest our selves on Christ by faith. (Perkins : )

There are further points of distinction relating to the Law’s being written on stone, its revelation in nature, its link to the mediator, Moses, and its dedication by the blood of beasts. The key question raised for Puritan divines about this distinction of the two covenants was whether the faith which forms part of the covenant of grace was to be seen as a condition in the same sense as the performance of the Law was in the covenant of works. Perkins’s answer is reasonably clear, though he still leaves a certain room for those who would want to argue that faith was in a sense a condition. He first talks about the sense in which the church below ‘is said to be above in heaven’. This is for two causes: first in respect ‘of her beginning, which is from the election and grace of God, and from Christ the Mediatour, of whose flesh and bone we are that beleeve . . . Secondly, the Church is said to bee above, because it dwels by faith in heaven with Christ: for the propertie of faith is to make us present after a sort, when we are absent’ (Perkins : ). His position is much clearer in the later discussion of v. : that they are made children of God, by the vertue of Gods promise . . . Hence it followes, that the meere grace of God, is the cause of our election and adoption, & not any thing in us. For the promise of God makes us Gods children: and the promise is of the meere grace of God: & therfore we are Gods children by the meere grace of God. For the cause of the cause, is the cause of the thing caused. . . . Marke further, the children of God are called the children of the promise, and this promise is absolute and effectual.’ (: )

These powerful, carefully argued statements do lead him to raise questions about the free will of those who are called. Can they resist their calling? No: the promise, which is ‘the absolute will of God’ and is conjoined with ‘the infinite

Galatians :–



power of God’, cannot be resisted. This does not mean, however, that all freedom of the will is abolished. Perkins’s answer is masterly: It sufficeth to the libertie of the will, that it bee free from compulsion: for constraint takes away the libertie of the will, and not necessitie. Secondly, the determination of mans will by the will of God, is the libertie of the will, and not the bondage thereof: for this is perfect libertie, when mans will is conformable to the will of God.’ (: )

It is interesting to turn to a later interpretation in the Calvinist tradition, contemporary with Lightfoot, that of the Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon. He has none of Calvin’s caution about making too sharp a distinction between the old covenant and the new. He starts emphatically: ‘There cannot be a greater difference in the world between two things than there is between law and grace’ (Spurgeon : ). The covenant of works, made between God and man, demanded that those who lived by it should obey it fully; anyone who failed in even one respect would die: ‘Mark me, if thou violatest one command, if thou dost rebel against a single ordinance, I will destroy thee for ever.’ The covenant of grace, by contrast, was a covenant made between God and Christ. The first covenant was conditional on man’s standing; the second was conditional with Christ ‘but as perfectly unconditional with us’. All that is needed is given: faith, repentance, good works, salvation, ‘as a purely gratuitous unconditional act’ (Spurgeon : ). In all this he stands four-square with Perkins. Importantly, for Spurgeon, the covenant of grace was made before the covenant of works: ‘Older even than the fundamental principles which guide our morals is that great fundamental rock of grace, in covenant made of old, long ere seers preached the law, and long ere Sinai smoked. Long before Adam stood in the garden God had ordained his people to eternal life, that they might be saved through Jesus’ (Spurgeon : ). The Law was never intended to be anything but a handmaid to the covenant of grace, ‘to sweep our hearts, and make the dust fly so that we may cry for blood to be sprinkled that the dust may be laid. The law is, so to speak, Jesus Christ’s dog, to go after his sheep, and bring them to the shepherd’ (Spurgeon : –). Law is no longer over a Christian (Rom :; cf. Gal :; :; :) but under him, to ‘walk on, to be his guide, his rule, his pattern’. Those who adhere to the covenant of works are in bondage; those who are under the covenant of grace are free. And because Hagar was cast out, ‘the covenant of works has ceased to be a covenant . . . so that the legalist may . . . know himself to be damned’. Thus, when Spurgeon comes to treat of the two sons, he treats his congregation to a sustained attack on all those who live by works. Legalism comes naturally: ‘Speaking of Arminians, Whitfield said, “We are all born Arminians.” It is grace that turns us into Calvinists, grace that makes Christians of us’ (Spurgeon : ). Those who object to this emphasis



Galatians :–

on God’s election rather than on human works, that ‘it is horrible, it is quite unjust, that I may be as good as I like, but if I am not a son of the promise, I cannot be saved’ (Spurgeon : ), merely show themselves to be sons of Ishmael. Only those who know they have nothing to offer are Isaacs: to them Christ will give good works, his Spirit will work in them and make them perfect and holy. If Spurgeon’s emphasis is on the ‘Nothing, nothing, NOTHING Nothing in my hands I bring Simply to the cross I cling’ (Spurgeon 1856: 11, quoting Toplady’s Rock of Ages)

then G.D. Watson, preaching in  at the Holiness Convention in the Star Hall, Manchester, uses the allegory to underline the perfection which properly belongs to the Christian. Hagar is identified with – putative – historical communities: the ‘old Sinai Church, the backsliding Jerusalem Church’; her children with ‘self-righteous Pharisaism and carnality’. Sarah in turn represents the ‘Church of the New Jerusalem . . . the Holy Ghost Church, the church of the Pentecost, the church of perfect salvation’ and her child is the ‘perfectly saved Christian’ (Watson : ). What is original about Watson’s treatment of this, scripturally authorized, typology is that he now applies it to the conflicts within the Christian between ‘inbred sin’, represented by Ishmael, and the new spiritual life which the believer, Isaac, receives by divine gift. This new life is not something that develops gradually according to natural laws of growth and development. It is a gift, but one which is threatened by original sin, which remains in the believer (Watson : ). Watson recognizes the continuing presence of ‘inbred sin’, but insists that it does not reign in the Christian. ‘Inbred sin’ may, like Ishmael, continue to torment believers: We can imagine that if little Isaac had a wheelcart Ishmael would go and take the wheels off, so that the boy could not wheel his cart. And so you know, many times when your spiritual chariot has tried to roll on towards heaven, there has been some miserable, evil thing in your heart, that has taken the wheels off you, and you have had a hard time serving God. (Watson : )

The duty of the Christian is to have ‘inbred sin’ cast out, lest it ‘kill the grace in your heart’ (Watson : ). Those who have their Ishmael cast out enjoy a life of holiness, a life of peace, a life of resignation and trust in their father’s care: they can even look forward to a fruitful old age: ‘Other men stop preaching, other men go here and go there, but Holiness people go right on; and as one remarked of John Wesley, they do work up to the very edge of their tomb-

Galatians :–



stone’ (Watson : ). Here at least we catch a glimpse of the role of this text in the Holiness movement, drawing on the dialectic of Luther’s interpretation to encourage believers to move beyond the self-abasement of some forms of Puritan spirituality. It was movements like this which in due course would lead to the enormous explosion of Pentecostalism in the last decades of the twentieth century.

Hilgenfeld Hilgenfeld’s careful historical reading does not significantly alter his reading of Paul here, as he sees him charting the major change in religious consciousness between the particularist understanding of religion in Judaism and the universal faith of his own gospel. Here Paul offers an allegorical proof, which corresponds to the intention of scripture (allegoroumena meaning ‘said’ not just ‘interpreted allegorically’). Paul’s reading of the allegory stumbles, however. He takes the first of the mothers to refer to the covenant of Sinai, corresponding to present Jerusalem, i.e. the followers of legal religion who are subjected to spiritual, as opposed to political, slavery; but then he moves from that last referent to compare the present Jerusalem with the heavenly Jerusalem, taken for the city of freedom. Here Hilgenfeld recognizes how far Paul is still indebted to early Christian eschatological ideas, wherein the heavenly city (however much this idea may have been spiritualized) was seen as the centre of the coming messianic theocracy; ‘It is the city of freedom, of the future ideal world order, to which the believer already now belongs’(Hilgenfeld : ). And the link here with Isa :, which Paul quotes, is in the motif of barrenness and desertion. The Christians who are now oppressed and persecuted (not only by the Jews, but perhaps more significantly for Paul, by the Jewish Christians) will be fruitful and liberated (Hilgenfeld : ). In this way, Hilgenfeld can show how the properly universal self-consciousness which he finds expressed in Paul emerges out of a more particularist understanding of religion, exemplified in certain forms of early Christian eschatology.

Lightfoot The shift from the communal to the deeply introspective reading of Paul’s allegory which we saw in Luther is well illustrated by Lightfoot’s reading of the passage. Lightfoot indeed openly testifies to his admiration for Luther and to the congeniality of his experience to Paul’s: ‘no man was better fitted by the sympathy of like experiences to appreciate the character and teaching of St Paul’



Galatians :–

(Lightfoot : x). Lightfoot’s commentary, on his own account, pays ‘special attention to everything relating to St Paul’s personal history and his intercourse with the Apostles and the Church of the Circumcision’ (Lightfoot : ix). Paul’s development of the allegory has its roots in his own experience in the desert, immediately after his conversion. He went to Mount Sinai on the Sinaitic peninsular to contemplate the meaning of the Law. ‘Standing on the threshold of the new covenant, he was anxious to look upon the birthplace of the old.’ It was here, ‘surrounded by the children of the desert, the descendants of Hagar the bondwoman’, that he understood ‘the true meaning and power of the law. In the rugged and barren region whence it issued, he saw a fit type of that bleak desolation, which it created and was intended to create in the soul of man.’ This in turn strengthened his convictions about his own mission and fitted him ‘to receive “fresh visions and revelations of the Lord.”’ Thus, like Moses and Elijah before him, Paul received his message; here he ‘was taught the breadth as well as the depth of the riches of God’s wisdom, and transformed from the champion of a bigoted and narrow tradition into the large-hearted Apostle of the Gentiles’ (Lightfoot : ). This is Lightfoot’s response to the Tübingen school, which understood the primitive gospel as ‘merely one of the many phases of Judaism’, seeing ‘those cherished beliefs which have been the life and light of many generations’ as ‘afterthoughts, progressive accretions, having no foundation in the Person and Teaching of Christ’ (Lightfoot : ix). Yet it is a very Romantic refutation of the Tübingen school, reminiscent in no small way of Renan’s Life of Jesus. Renan contrasts the ‘ravishing nature’ of Galilee which ‘gave all the dreams of Galilee a particular idyllic and charming character’ with the area around Jerusalem, ‘perhaps the saddest country in the world’ and which leads to a spirit which is ‘austere, bitterly monotheistic’ (Renan n.d: ). Perhaps more importantly, it posits the kind of flight of the Spirit which Bousset () saw as central to Paul’s religious genius, which lifted his teaching above the cause and effect of religious history (for the influence of T.S. Carlyle on Bousset, see Riches : ). Lightfoot sets out the distinctive marks of the new people of faith in terms of a particular type of religious experience, and links this with Paul and his great interpreter, Luther. On the other hand, none of this is so individualized that he cannot identify the kind of religious experience on which Paul turns his back with particular communities. ‘St. Paul’s persecutors were at first Jews, afterwards Judaizers; but both alike were “born after the flesh,” for both alike claimed to inherit the covenant by the performance of certain material carnal ordinances’ (Lightfoot : ). It is remarkable to see how the theological battleground has shifted. If for Calvin, Perkins and much of the earlier tradition the threat was posed by Marcionite interpretations which drove too sharp a wedge between the old and the new covenant, threatening to introduce a measure of change or duality into

Galatians :–



the mind of God, for Lightfoot it comes from non-supernaturalistic readings of the history of the early church. Remarkably, despite his wonderful knowledge of the tradition, Lightfoot scarcely pauses to discuss the issues raised by Paul’s portrayal of the two covenants in terms of the comparison between a slave woman and a free woman. He duly notes the fact that Paul lists on the one side of his comparison Hagar, the bond woman, Ishmael the child after the flesh, the old covenant and the earthly Jerusalem (which he understands as a reference to ‘the whole race’ of the Jews); and, on the other, Sarah, the free woman, Isaac, the child of promise, the new covenant and the heavenly Jerusalem (‘representing that spiritual city of which the Christian is even now a denizen’; Lightfoot : ). But what interests him about this set of correspondences is the way they characterize two different types of inwardness, of religious experience, brought out, on the one hand, by the image of Mount Sion, of old the joy of the whole earth, now more beautiful than ever in the fresh glories of the Herodian renaissance, glittering in gold and marble (Joseph, [Jewish War] v. .); on the other, Sinai with its rugged peaks and barren sides, bleak and desolate, the oppressive power of which the Apostle had felt during his sojourn there . . . – these scenes fitly represented the contrast between the glorious hopes of the new covenant and the blank despair of the old. (Lightfoot : )

This stark contrast between Jewish and Christian spirituality lacks the dialectical character of Luther’s account of Christian existence in its struggle to overcome the fear of the Law and to find its peace and freedom in Christ. It has potentially disastrous consequences for Jewish–Christian relations, and leads easily into later portrayals of Judaism as a religion of self-redemption, so sharply attacked by E.P. Sanders (: –, esp. ). It represents, surprisingly in Lightfoot with his insistence on the ‘Person and Teaching of Christ’, a subjective turn in theology, construing it less as an attempt to delineate a Christian cosmology than to offer a ‘normed Christian self-description’ (Frei : ), regardless, it might seem, of its theological implications. It is certainly a turning away from the theological debates which had so engaged Christian commentators down the ages. This is not to say that Lightfoot, as he is sometimes represented, refuses to engage in theological interpretation. Barrett rightly refutes this charge (Barrett : ). But Barrett’s account of Lightfoot’s theological tools in terms of a ‘devout empiricism’ misses, I think, the sense in which he seeks to emulate Luther and penetrate into Paul’s religious selfconsciousness. In this sense, he is both closer to Baur than he might wish to allow: for Baur’s concern is also to document the rise of a new religious selfconsciousness in early Christianity, precisely through the conflicts within the early Church. He is also taking his place in a tradition which may sit more or



Galatians :–

less easily with the kind of Hegelianism which informed Baur’s work. Baur was concerned above all to show Christianity as emerging out of developments in Judaism and the early church, as part of a world-historical process. Lightfoot’s dismissal of this as depicting the gospel ‘as merely one of many phases of Judaism’ (Lightfoot : ix) suggests strongly that he simply misunderstood the theological intention of Baur’s work, seeing it as merely reductionist. His own historical, philological work, then, stands more strictly in the service of the portrayal of the ‘pious self-consciousness’ (Schleiermacher) of Paul. In this respect, there are lines to be traced from Lightfoot to Bultmann’s existential interpretation of Paul, even if the latter is philosophically more developed and is more consciously Lutheran than is Lightfoot. One might even, rather surprisingly to some, trace lines through to E.P. Sanders’s attempt to set out Paul’s ‘pattern of religion’ in terms of a ‘participationist eschatology’ (Sanders : ). For these scholars all attempt, very variously, to describe the Christian community’s self-understanding. The point is not that these three agree on the precise terms of the description to be offered: they patently do not. The point is more that all three are, to a lesser or greater degree, no longer engaged in the theological debate which was sustained within the Christian tradition of readings of Paul until the beginning of the nineteenth century, but have rather embraced a theological task, first enunciated by Schleiermacher, which, while it allows the theologian to interrogate the tradition, in an important sense also allows him/ her to focus exclusively on the task of self-description. And it is this path that New Testament scholarship has increasingly taken.

Galatians 

The New Life of Faith

Overview Paul has given his justification of his Law-free Gospel. This has involved a down-grading of the Law: it was given by angels; it was given for a time only; it never brought life. By contrast, he argues, those who believe in Christ have been rescued from bondage to dark powers; have been justified freely by the grace of God; have received a new life of freedom in the Spirit; and participate in the life of the Son himself, who died to the Law, in whose death and life they participate. All this in answer to his question: how could those who have experienced the new life in the Spirit embrace the way of the Law, which can bring only death and bondage? But Paul must also anticipate the counter-question: how can believers know how to act properly without the guidance of the Law (which his opponents have insisted is God’s traditional way of leading his people)? This is Galatians Through the Centuries, First Edition. John Riches. © 2013 John Riches. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Galatians 

a crucial turning point for Paul’s churches, as it is a question which will continue to exercise the churches, not least at the Reformation: was the church to embrace the Torah (the Pentateuch) as determinative of its practice, as its rule of life? Or was it to develop new forms of life which flowed from its new relationship to the Spirit, from the life of Christ which imbued it and which for Paul meant freedom from the old bondages, including bondage to law/the Law? It is to these questions that Paul turns in this chapter, though the break is not as clean as it might be. While he turns immediately to the question of whether or not the Galatians should be circumcised, he continues to refer back to the arguments which he has just made and to offer some further general comments about the nature of Christian life and its freedom. What Paul proposes is a kind of twofold solution, with the two halves fitting only loosely together. () He presents the Christian way as ‘faith working through love’ where love (of neighbour) is the fulfilment of the Law, quoting Lev : as the summary fulfilment of the law (:, a line of argument which will be developed more fully in chapter : cf. Gal :: bear one another’s burdens and so fulfil the ‘law’ of Christ). () He presents Christian life as flowing organically from participation in the Spirit, the believers’ union with Christ: Christians are led by the Spirit and so bear the fruit of the Spirit. Each of these lines of thought contains, as we shall see, a number of rich subsidiary themes.



Faith Working Through Love Fulfils the Law (:–)

The first section of the chapter is full of paradoxes, real or apparent contradictions. Christian life is contrasted with life under the Law, but is itself a fulfilment of the Law. Obedience to the Law is compared to a ‘yoke of slavery’; yet Paul also states that circumcision or non-circumcision are matters of indifference, v. . If Paul has till now contrasted faith with works, he now speaks of faith working through love. If he has said that faith justifies, he now says that believers in the spirit ‘wait for the hope of righteousness’. These comments raise some major questions. In what sense does the believer already possess righteousness? Is it merely something to be hoped for? In what sense can faith be said to ‘work’, to produce works? Does this mean that faith without works is not justifying? At the end of this section, Paul returns to the question of Christian freedom, warning the Galatians not to abuse it as an opportunity for the ‘flesh’ (a term open to many interpretations, as we shall see) and asserting that the whole law is fulfilled in the command to love one’s neighbour as oneself. As these issues are all closely interrelated, I will treat the passage as whole. Marcion has an interesting textual variant in v. , which also occurs in Epiphanias: instead of ‘the whole law is fulfilled in one word (saying)’, he has

Galatians 



‘the whole law is fulfilled among you’. As some of the Western and Latin texts contain both ‘among you’ and ‘in one word’, it is just possible that the phrase ‘in one word’ was accidentally omitted from Marcion’s text, which originally contained both. More likely, thinks Harnack, is that Marcion replaced the one with the other, emphasizing that the Law was fulfilled among Christian believers and not among Jews (Harnack : *). This would presumably be more a reflection on the different kinds of righteousness which were mediated to the Jews and the Christians via their different gods than a reflection on the moral capabilities of the two groups. Most early Latin commentators, together with those later commentators who follow the Vulgate, read the chapter as starting with the words: ‘Stand fast therefore’, taking the statement about the freedom with which Christ sets us free as a relative clause belonging to the last verse of chapter . (For detailed discussions of the textual issues here see Lightfoot : , –.)

Augustine Underlying Augustine’s reading of the first half of chapter  is the question: how can Christians fulfil the Law at the same time as Paul forbids them to submit to some of its regulations? His emphasis is on Paul’s efforts at preventing the Galatians from yielding to the persuasion of the Judaizers. The fact that Paul says ‘Stand firm, therefore’ indicates that they have not yet fallen. What is striking here is that this passage is clearly directed to non-Jews, who are under pressure to be circumcised, and that their threatened circumcision and observance of the Law are compared to their former state of slavery as pagans. Those who were formerly Gentiles should not ‘agree to be slaves again under a yoke of carnal observances. For although it is the law of God, its observances were meant to bind a carnal people like slaves’ (Augustine : ). How, then, does this very negative view of the Law square with Paul’s own actions in circumcising Timothy (Acts :–)? Jerome had taught that the apostles merely simulated the observance of the Law, in that they performed the actions of the Law without subscribing to its intentions (see above on Gal :–). Augustine, by contrast, taught that they did indeed observe the Law, and that this was permissible to those who lived ‘only in that time in which the grace of faith was at first revealed’. This was fitting in order to give the regulations of the old Law a fitting burial. Once ‘the doctrine of grace has been firmly established throughout so many nations’, then the continued observance of such regulations (which are read out only for our instruction; see  Cor :) would be madness (ep. .–; NPNF .–). Whereas Augustine did not think that Paul had allowed Titus to be circumcised under pressure from the Jewish Christians, he accepted that Paul had circumcised Timothy, ‘because he had been born of a Jewish mother and was under an obligation to



Galatians 

help her relatives by indicating that in the Christian doctrine he had not learned to despise the rites of the Old Law’ (De mendacio .; Muldowney : ; CSEL : .–). Aquinas (: ; : ) relates this to the different views of history taken by the two Fathers, Jerome distinguishing simply two periods, before and after the gospel, Augustine dividing history into three periods: before the passion, before the spreading of grace throughout the world, and after the spreading of grace. In this interim it was permissible even for those who had been converted from Judaism to observe Jewish customs, ‘provided they set no hope on them’ (Aquinas : ; : ). Only if believers turn to circumcision, believing that without it they cannot achieve salvation, will they forfeit Christ, for then they will be setting carnal desires above the things we wait for spiritually, viz. the hope of righteousness. What matters is not circumcision or uncircumcision, but faith working through love, viz. a life where works are done not out of fear but out of love. Paul’s ‘faith working through love’, that is to say, is contrasted not with other types of faith (for example, as understood by later Catholic commentators, ‘dead’ faith), but rather with the life of slavery under the Law, ‘because slavery under the law works through fear’ (Augustine : ). For Augustine, this theme of the life of freedom in faith is then taken up and developed in vv. –, where such freedom is seen as the fulfilment of the Law. Those under the Law were able to fulfil the ceremonial law (those aspects of the Law ‘that are counted among the sacraments’) out of ‘fear for their own present lives’; but they ‘absolutely could not, however, fulfil the works having to do with good morals, for these can be fulfilled only by love’. Not to kill because one fears the consequences is not to ‘fulfil the command of righteousness; what does fulfil it is not to kill another human being because it is unrighteous, even if one could get away with it not only with other people but even with God’ (Augustine : ). Such love for one’s neighbour is the fulfilling of the Law, and it is proper to faith because faith, when it asks (impetrare = obtains through seeking and asking; Augustine : , n. ), obtains the Holy Spirit, through whom the love of God has been poured out in the hearts’ (Augustine : ; cf. Rom :). Thus faith fulfils the Law not through its own efforts but through the Spirit’s gift of love. This is coming close to the doctrine which would trouble Luther, that works of love were necessary for faith to be justifying.

Chrysostom Chrysostom, too, sees vv. – as referring to the works produced by faith in the Spirit which bring righteousness: ‘faith suffices to obtain for us the Spirit, and by Him righteousness, and many and great benefits’ (NPNF :). But while he is at one with Augustine in this belief, he draws interestingly different conclusions: faith is not enough by itself, as witness the present dilemma of the Galatian

Galatians 



believers. Commenting on v. , ‘neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision; but faith working through love’, he writes: ‘here he gives them a hard blow, by showing that this error had crept in because the love of Christ had not been rooted within them. For to believe is not all that is required, but also to abide in love.’ Here love is seen not so much as a gift of the Spirit as something required of the believer: ‘It is as if he had said, Had ye loved Christ as ye ought, ye would not have deserted to bondage, nor abandoned Him who redeemed you, nor treated with contumely Him who gave you freedom’ (NPNF .). What is required is greater effort of the will, greater constancy and affection towards Christ. Again, these thoughts are picked up in Chrysostom’s discussion of vv. –. It is here that Chrysostom sees the beginning of the ethical section of the epistle (Paul ‘appears to digress into a moral discourse’). Christ has delivered us from the bondage of the Law, so that we may be ‘free to act as we will, not that we may use our liberty for evil, but that we may have ground for receiving a higher reward, advancing to a higher philosophy’ that might ‘surpass the Law’ (NPNF .). This philosophy is the teaching that they should love one another. ‘[T]he bonds of the Law are broken . . . not that our standard may be lowered, but that it may be exalted’ (NPNF .). If for Augustine such a raising of standards could be achieved only by the infused Spirit of love which inspired the believer to truly moral action, in Chrysostom it is above all the deliberate choice of the soul which determines whether the believer leads a life in accordance with the teaching of the Spirit. It is not that the flesh is so corrupt, or has such power over the believer that without the power of the Spirit he would be unable to do the good. What is required is for the soul to mortify the flesh and keep it in under control. All of this is directed against those ‘who assert that the workmanship of God is evil, and who, neglecting the sloth of the soul, madly inveigh against the body, and traduce our flesh, whereof Paul afterwards discourses, accusing not the flesh, but devilish thoughts’ (NPNF .).

Aquinas Following the Vulgate text, ‘Stand fast and be not held again under the yoke of bondage’, Aquinas takes the main thrust of this section to be pastoral, correctional: ‘he leads them back from error to a state of rectitude’ (Aquinas : ; : ). To submit themselves to the bondage of the Law would be akin to returning to their former state: ‘For in their case, observances of this sort were akin to idolatry, inasmuch as they entertained a false notion touching Christ, believing that salvation cannot be obtained by Him without the observances of the Law’ (Aquinas : ; : ). They also showed by the desire to be circumcised that they misunderstood the nature of circumcision. Circumcision was given as a ‘sign of the covenant between you and me’ (Gen :), which

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Galatians 

Aquinas clearly takes to refer to the covenant between Christ and the Church; ‘therefore those who submitted to circumcision believed that they were still living in the age of the sign and that the one signified had not yet come. Thus they were fallen away from Christ’ (Aquinas : ; : ). Paul, Aquinas continues, having explained why they should not turn to the Law, returns to his appeal to them to stand fast. He takes the ‘we’ in v. : ‘For through the Spirit, by faith, we eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness’ to refer to the apostles themselves and proceeds, unusually, simply to list without further discussion, the various possible interpretations of ‘the hope of righteousness’: eternal happiness, Christ as the grounds of our hope, hope based on justification by faith, or that which we hope for, viz. eternal life. What is certain is that the faith through which righteousness comes is ‘not of man but of the Holy Spirit Who inspires it. “You have received the spirit of adoption of Sons, whereby we cry: Abba (Father)” (Rom :). Therefore, as faith is from the Spirit, so from faith is hope, and from hope the justice through which we reach eternal life’ (Aquinas : ; : ). In this way, faith ceases to be the human response to God’s grace and becomes a supernatural, ‘infused’ virtue. Faith working by love is distinguished now, not from the way of life of those under the Law, but from ‘dead faith’, viz. faith without works (Jas :), which is unformed faith, i.e. not faith informed by love. ‘For faith is a knowledge of the word of God – “That Christ may dwell by faith in your hearts” (Eph. :) – which word is not perfectly possessed or perfectly known unless the love which it hopes for is possessed’ (Aquinas : ; : ). It was, so Aquinas, works of such faith formed by love that had enabled them to run well in the past, and he cites Ps :: ‘I have run the way of thy commandments, when thou didst enlarge my heart’ (Aquinas : ; : ). As we shall see, the doctrine of faith informed by love will provide the main starting point for Catholic responses to the Reformation at the Council of Trent. Whereas in vv. – Paul examined what it was to stand firm in the faith, he now in vv. – ‘establishes its mode’, gives an account of its nature, its ‘condition’ and ‘mode’. This is a kind of phenomenological account of the nature of Christian life and catches something of the peculiar character of Paul’s argument here, which is not simply prescriptive, laying down rules or patterns of behaviour, but rather analytic or descriptive, analysing the nature of Christian existence. Any condition may be said to be either free or slavish. Christians have been called to freedom and should therefore not return to the bondage of the Law. Nor, on the other hand, should they misuse their freedom by ‘supposing that they may sin with impunity’. Rather the ‘mode of standing’, the way in which they live out their freedom, is by serving one another in charity of spirit, for the ‘whole state consists in charity, without which a man is nothing ( Cor. :ff.)’ (Aquinas : ; : ), and such charity proceeds from the Holy Spirit.

Galatians 



But if Christian ‘standing in the faith’ is a state of liberty, how can Paul say that it consists in serving one another? Here Aquinas turns to Aristotle: someone is free insofar as he is the author of his own actions (causa sui) rather than his action being caused by another, whether acting as a moving (efficient) or final cause. It is love which urges us, spontaneously, to act. In this sense ‘[c]harity, therefore, has liberty as to its movent (efficient) cause, because it works of itself. . . . But it is a servant when, putting one’s own interests aside, it devotes itself to things beneficial to the neighbor’ (Aquinas : ; : ). This leads into a futher discussion of how the command to love one’s neighbour can be said to fulfil the Law, when Mt : also gives the command to love God. Aquinas first shows how the two commands belong intimately together in the Law, and then shows how loving one’s neighbour ‘as oneself ’ does not mean ceasing to love oneself. Loving one’s neighbour as oneself does not mean, says Aquinas, that we should love our neighbour more than ourselves, for that would be against the order of charity which requires that we love ourselves more. Rather, we should love our neighbour as ourselves. This means, first, that our love for our neighbour should be genuine, which is to say that, just as I will myself a good for my own sake, so I should ‘will him a good for his own sake, and not because it is useful or pleasant for me’. Such love should, secondly, be just. Everyone wants for itself what is ‘most eminent’ in it. That is to say, it wants to cultivate its strengths, to develop its powers: in human beings this means ‘understanding and reason’. He, therefore, loves himself who wants for himself such goods. ‘Accordingly, you then love your neighbour as yourself, when you will him the good of understanding and reason.’ Thirdly, ‘just as you love yourself for the sake of God, so you love your neighbour for the sake of God, namely, that he may attain to God’ (Aquinas : –; : ).

Luther Luther here takes the text to read: ‘Stand fast therefore in that liberty to which Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.’ Thus he sees Paul, as he nears the end of his epistle, ‘disput[ing] very vehemently in defence of the doctrine of faith and Christian liberty, against the false apostles, the enemies and destroyers of the same’. In fact, in Luther’s commentary there is very little mention at this stage of the false apostles or the situation of the Galatians: everything is read in terms of Luther’s contemporary context, of the forces ranged against his gospel and the internal conflicts which he still endures. Watchfulness is essential, for ‘Satan most deadly hateth the light of the Gospel, that is to say, the doctrine of grace, liberty, consolation, and life’ (Luther : ; LW .). And this liberty is not civil or political liberty, it is

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not a ‘fleshly, or rather a devilish liberty’, whereby people ‘obey neither God nor laws, but do what they list’, as do the Anabaptists, which will be at liberty in their opinions and in all their doings, to the end they may teach and do whatsoever they dream to be right, without reprehension. . . . This is that liberty whereby Christ hath made us free, not from an earthly bondage, from the Babylonian captivity, or from the tyranny of the Turks, but from God’s everlasting wrath. And where is this done? In the conscience.

This liberty is so great that, compared to it, the other liberties (civil and carnal) ‘are but as one drop of water in respect of the whole sea. For who is able to express what a thing it is, when a man is assured in his heart that God neither is nor will be angry with him, but will be for ever a merciful and a loving father unto him for Christ’s sake?’ And this liberty from the wrath of God entails further freedoms: from ‘law, sin, death, the power of the devil, hell, etc’ (Luther : ; LW .; cf. the quotation from this passage in Betz : v; Riches ). Nevertheless, though the Christian enjoys such freedoms, ‘in the time of temptation, in the agony of conscience, in practice to apply them to himself, and to feel the excellency of this liberty and the fruit thereof, it is a harder matter than can be expressed’ (Luther : ; LW .). It is therefore to be weighed that Paul here attributes this liberty not to the Law or our righteousness but to Christ. Those who turn away from such liberty and become ‘doers of the law’ bring terrible bondage on themselves, for the Law ‘doth but reveal, increase, and aggravate sin, accuse, terrify, condemn, and gender wrath, and finally it driveth [poor] consciences into desperation, which is the most miserable and grievous bondage that can be’. Such people are popularly called ‘the devil’s martyrs, which take more pains, and punish themselves more in purchasing hell, than the martyrs of Christ do in obtaining heaven’ (Luther : ; LW .). Clearly here it is Luther’s contemporary opponents who are most in view, but the ease with which he moves from first-century Galatia to sixteenth-century Europe allows him to extend the principle at will. Paul’s prohibition of circumcision: ‘If you be circumcised, Christ shall profit you nothing’, becomes a blanket condemnation of all doctrines, works, religions and ceremonies . . . Whosoever teach that there is anything necessary to salvation (whether they be Papists, Turks, Jews, or Sectaries) beside faith in Christ, or shall devise any work or religion, or observe any rule, tradition, or ceremony whatsoever, with this opinion that by such things they shall obtain forgiveness of sins, righteousness, and everlasting life; they hear in this place the sentence of the Holy Ghost pronounced against them by the Apostle, that Christ profiteth them nothing at all. (Luther : ; LW .)

The vehemence of the thought and language throughout this section (and indeed throughout the commentary) is clearly related to the violence of Luther’s

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recalled and present emotions. These extreme views of the damnableness of all other human ways, religious or otherwise, are presented as comfort to the tormented soul: Let us bear this well in mind in our private temptations, when the devil accuseth and terrifieth our conscience to drive it to desperation. . . . When (I say) that great dragon, that old serpent the devil (who deceiveth the whole world, and accuseth our brethren in the presence of God day and night, Rev. xii) cometh and layeth unto thy charge, that thou hast not only done no good, but hast also transgressed the law of God, say unto him: Thou troublest me with remembrance of sins past; thou puttest me also in mind that I have done no good; but this is nothing to me . . . but removing both far out of my sight, I only rest in that liberty wherein Christ hath made me free. (Luther : ; LW .)

It is in line with this anguished view of the predicament of those who seek to obey the Law that Luther now takes ‘For I testify again unto every man which is circumcised, that he is a debtor to do the whole law’ to mean that he ‘performeth no piece of the law; yea that in the very work of circumcision he is not circumcized, and even in the fulfilment of the law he fulfilleth it not, but transgresseth it’ (Luther : ; LW .). Luther links this directly with his own experience: For the more men go about to satisfy the law, the more they transgress it. . . . When I was a monk, I endeavoured as much as was possible to live after the strait rule of mine Order: I was wont to shrive myself with great devotion, and to reckon up all my sins (yet being always very contrite before), and I returned to confession very often, and thoroughly performed the penance that was enjoined unto me: yet for all this my conscience could never be fully certified, but was always in doubt, and said: This or that thou hast not done rightly; thou wast not contrite [and sorrowful] enough; this sin thou didst omit in thy confession, &c. Therefore the more I went about to help my weak, wavering and afflicted conscience by men’s traditions, the more weak and doubtful and the more afflicted I was. (Luther : ; LW .)

But this experience of temptation is not just limited to his former life as a monk; it continues from time to time to afflict him, and this informs his reading not just of Paul’s admonitions to the Galatians to stand firm in their liberty but of Paul’s language of faith and hope, in which Luther is concerned both to do justice to the ambiguities of his own life of faith and to counter Catholic doctrines of faith and love. Like Aquinas, Luther recognizes the ambiguity of the expression ‘hope of righteousness’: it can refer either to the object hoped for or to the affection of the one who hopes. In the first sense, we ‘wait through the Spirit by faith for . . . the righteousness hoped for, which shall certainly be revealed in the time appointed’. In the second sense,

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We wait . . . for righteousness with hope and desire; that is to say, we are righteous, howbeit our righteousness is not yet revealed, but hangeth yet in hope (Rom. viii. ). For as long as we live here, sin remaineth in our flesh; there is also a law in our flesh and members, rebelling against the law of our mind, and leading us captives unto the service of sin (Rom. vii. ). Now when these affections of the flesh do rage and reign, and we on the other side do through the Spirit wrestle against the same, then there is a place for hope. Indeed we have begun to be justified through faith: whereby also we have received the first fruits of the Spirit, and the mortification of the flesh is also begun in us; but we be not yet perfectly righteous. It remaineth then that we be perfectly justified, and that is it which we hope for. So our righteousness is not yet in actual possession, but lieth under hope. (Luther : –; LW .)

This passage is remarkable, first, in that it shows Luther looking for a total transformation of the believer into a righteous person, something which indeed, though not yet achieved, is in process of achievement – a view very different from the Melanchthonian/Calvinist view of righteousness as imputed to the believer, something reckoned to him as a consequence of the righteousness of Christ; second, in that it eloquently expounds Luther’s understanding of Christian existence as simul iustus et peccator, as polarized between the certainty and joy of faith and the continuing struggle between flesh and Spirit: pecca forte sed fortius fide et gaude in Christus. In the same way, both faith, which Luther defines as knowledge of the gospel and its doctrines of justification by faith, and hope, which is the rousing of the affections and the will to persevere in such belief, are complementary. ‘Faith is the dialectic, which conceiveth the idea of whatsoever is to be believed. Hope is the rhetoric, which amplifieth, urgeth, persuadeth, and exhorteth to constancy, to the end that faith should not fail in time of temptation, but should keep hold of the Word and firmly cleave unto it’ (Luther : ; LW .–). At the same time, Luther has scores to settle with the scholastic theologians, in particular with the doctrine, clearly to be traced back to Aquinas, that the infused virtue of faith does not of itself justify but requires further to be informed by charity (informata per charitatem), which is the grace of God which makes the believer acceptable to Godself (gratia gratum faciens). For Luther this clearly amounts to a doctrine of justification by works, for on this, Catholic view, it is not faith which justifies but rather active, ‘working’ (operatrix) love. The consequence of such a view is, further, that Catholics can speak of faith as coexisting with mortal sin (CF /DS : By every mortal sin grace is lost, but not faith). For Luther, it is monstrous to teach that a gift of God through the Holy Spirit infused into our hearts can stand together with mortal sin. Luther objects that this is clearly incompatible with the grammar of Paul’s phrase, which says not ‘faith which justifieth by love’ but rather ‘faith worketh by love’. Even in

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the moral philosophy of the schools, it is accepted that ‘works are not righteousness, but works are done from righteousness’. He further attacks the underlying doctrine of fides informis: Paul does not say that it is love which is efficacious and which works, but rather that it is faith. So faith cannot be ‘some rude and unformed quality, but . . . an efficacious and working quiddity, and as it were a substance or (as they say) substantial form’. On such a view love is not the agent but the means by which faith works. ‘For he saith not: Charity is efficacious, but: Faith is efficacious, and not: Charity worketh, but: Faith worketh.’ True readers of Scripture should not come with their ‘own cogitations’ but rather bring nothing, ‘but seeking to carry away thoughts from the Scriptures; and moreover, they ought diligently to consider the words, comparing those going before with those following after, and endeavour to grasp the complete sense of each place, not picking out words and phrases to suit their own dreams.’ Paul is not defining the nature of faith or talking here about justification, ‘but as it were gathering up his argument, he briefly sheweth what the Christian life itself is’. What is required is faith which is not ‘hypocritical, but true and lively. That is that faith which exerciseth and requireth good works through love. It is as much to say as: He that will be a true Christian indeed, or one of Christ’s kingdom, must be a true believer. Now he believeth not truly, if works of charity follow not his faith.’ Christian life consists inwardly in ‘faith towards God, and outwardly in charity and good works towards our neighbour’ (Luther : –; LW :). Such a view stands clearly against those who would misuse their liberty in Christ ‘into the liberty of the flesh’ (Luther : ; LW .), but also against those ‘sectaries’ and Anabaptists who ‘being bewitched in the doctrine of good works, must needs teach fantastical and superstitious kinds of works’. They may impress some, ‘But if thou behold these works in the light of the Word, thou wilt find them to be mere trifles and things of naught, pertaining only unto places, times, apparel, respect of persons, &c.’ (Luther : ; LW .). Paul’s teaching against such new legalism is clear: the whole Law is fulfilled in the command to love one’s neighbour. This is a harsh condemnation of those who took seriously the injunctions of the Sermon on the Mount and who suffered cruelly for their beliefs at the hands of the Roman Church and ‘mainstream’ Reformers alike.

Calvin In listing those things from which Christ has freed us, Calvin, unlike Luther, refers to the Law only in respect of ceremonies, adding, with Luther, that such freedom from the Law is only a part of the liberty experienced by the Christian conscience, which is no longer under the power of God’s judgement, because Christ has ‘revoked the power of the law, so far as it held us liable to the judgement

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of God under pain of eternal death, because, in a word, He has rescued us from the tyranny of sin, Satan, death. Thus under one species is comprehended the whole genus’ (Calvin : ). This is a carefully weighed passage. Calvin argues that Paul’s remarks here are directed specifically to the question of Jewish ceremonies, on whose observance the ‘false apostles’ insisted, even for Gentile converts. There is nothing in the phrase ‘yoke of bondage’ to suggest that the Law proper is a burden which the Galatians should throw off. Yet, freedom from such observances is hardly the whole of Christian liberty. Calvin’s position is that we are still obligated to fulfil the moral demands of the Law, but that we are freed from liability to judgement by Christ’s death. It is in that sense that we are no longer subject to the tyranny of sin, Satan and death, viz. that these powers are no longer able to come between us and eternal life. Our future salvation no longer depends on our performance of the Law, while the written Law of the Old Testament, in, for Calvin, its essentials, remains valid for Christians. What these essentials are will be a matter for considerable disagreement among Calvinists. This focus on the ceremonial aspect of the Law as characteristic of life before faith has interesting consequences for Calvin’s reading of v. : ‘for through the Spirit, by faith, we wait for the hope of righteousness.’ For Calvin, the emphasis is probably on perseverance: ‘Let us continue stedfastly in the hope of righteousness which we obtain by faith.’ Faith is characterized by waiting for the righteousness to come. This is also said of the Patriarchs (cf. Gal :); they too ‘pleased God by faith; but their faith was wrapped up in the veil of ceremonies. Therefore he distinguishes us from them by the word “spirit”, which is contrasted to outward shadows.’ What this means is that whereas their faith ‘was adorned with the pomp of ceremonies’, the present believer’s faith is not, but is ‘satisfied with the spiritual worship of God’ (Calvin : ). Worship, then, is to be free of ceremony, but this does not mean that the sacraments are to be wholly excluded. For received sincerely, [they] are not strictly the works of men but of God. In Baptism or the Lord’s Supper we do nothing; we simply come before God to receive His grace. Baptism, from our side, is passive work (respectu nostri est opus passivum). We bring nothing to it but faith, which has all things laid up in Christ. But what say the Papists? They invent the opus operatum by which men merit the grace of God.

For Calvin any attempt to understand the sacraments in terms of the notion of opus operatum, (a work that is done/worked) ‘by which men merit the grace of God’ is ‘to extinguish utterly the truth of the sacrament. We retain Baptism and the Lord’s Supper because Christ wished them to be used perpetually. But we bitterly detest those ungodly absurdities, as we should do’ (Calvin : ). Thus Calvin emphasizes the sense of expectation and reception in Christian

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life and worship: the faith which Christians bring to their worship is one which looks in expectation for the grace and the righteousness which they will receive, not something which in itself guarantees or effects anything. Again in discussing the phrase ‘faith working through love’ Calvin has Paul making a contrast between ceremonies and the exercise of love, lest the Jews should be too pleased with themselves. . . . Therefore it is as if he had said: ‘God does not keep us nowadays under ceremonies; it is enough if we exercise ourselves in love.’ But yet this does not set aside our sacraments which are aids to faith; he is merely confirming what he had formerly taught on the spiritual worship of God.

Love here, then, is understood primarily as love of God, expressing itself in spiritual worship, though this is certainly for Calvin linked to love of neighbour. All this would be straightforward, says Calvin, were it not for Catholic uses of this verse, which take ‘love’ to refer to something added to faith, without which we are not justified. But it is not that the faith which justifies is alone (bereft of love), rather it is solely faith (not the works of love or of faith working through love) which justifies. Faith is always joined with good works, and the ‘Papists themselves, like murderers, tear it to pieces, sometimes making it informis and empty of love, and sometimes formata. But we deny that true faith can be separated from the Spirit of regeneration. When we debate justification, however, we exclude all works’ (Calvin : ). Calvin is also concerned to correct possible misunderstandings of v. . The equation of the whole Law with love of neighbour omits any reference to the first table of the Law (sc. of the Ten Commandments) concerning worship of God, with Paul referring only to the second table and its rulings on social relationships. This, he says, needs to be taken in the context of Paul’s dispute with the Judaizers over ceremonies. They insisted on ceremonies alone, while the ‘present commendation of love (of neighbour) is intended to teach the Galatians that it forms the chief part of Christian perfection’. The problem is that love of God is invisible. Observance of ceremonies may provide some, but a very uncertain, proof of it. ‘God therefore wants to make trial of our love to Him by that love of our brother which He commends to us. This is why not here alone, but also in Rom . and , love is called the fulfilling of the law, not because it is superior to the worship of God, but because it is the proof of it.’ Again, Calvin enters into discussion with Catholic theologians (‘Sorbonnists’), who argue, much like Aquinas, ‘that the love of ourselves is always first in order’. Whereas for Aquinas, love of self was the model for our love of neighbour, for Calvin ‘love (amor) of ourselves begets a neglect and contempt of others, it begets cruelty, it is the fount of avarice, of violence, deceit and all kindred vices, it drives us to impatience and arms us with the desire for

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revenge. The Lord therefore demands that it be changed to love (charitatem)’ (Calvin : ). While it is, as Nygren argued in detail much later in Agape and Eros (), quite possible to distinguish between these two ideas in Greek as well as in Latin, there is, however, no use of eros in this passage to support Calvin’s distinction. In general the passage is marked by Calvin’s concentration on questions of ceremonial, which Paul had given specific attention to at the beginning of chapter , but which are here declared to be of secondary concern compared with the central values of ‘faith working through love’. There is an important change of focus, that is to say, between earlier readings which had seen this as a more general account of Christian ethics, and Calvin’s, which is perhaps over keen to stress that Christians are liberated only from the ceremonial aspects of the Law.

Council of Trent It is an intriguing fact about our letter that it contains not only many of the major texts on which Luther based his teaching about justification by faith (Gal :) but also one of the central texts around which the Catholic response at the Council of Trent was marshalled. The relevant decree reads as follows: For although no one can be just unless the merits of the passion of our Lord Jesus Christ are imparted to him, still this communication takes place in the justification of the sinner, when by the merit of the same most holy passion, ‘God’s love is poured through the Holy Spirit into the hearts’ (Rom :) of those who are being justified and inheres in them. Hence, in the very act of justification, together with the remission of sins, man receives through Jesus Christ, into whom he is inserted, the gifts of faith, hope and charity ( Cor :), all infused at the same time. For faith without hope and charity never unites a man perfectly with Christ, nor makes him a living member of His body. Therefore it is rightly said that ‘faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead’ (James :) and unprofitable, and that ‘in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is of any avail, but faith working through love’ (Gal :; :). This is the faith which, in keeping with apostolic tradition, the catechumens ask of the Church before the reception of baptism when they ask for ‘the faith that gives eternal life’, a life which faith without hope and charity cannot give. Hence they immediately hear Christ’s words: ‘If you would enter life, keep the commandments’ (Mt :). (CF –; DS –)

This declaration is linked to the canons which condemn, first, the teaching that justification is by ‘the imputation of Christ’s righteousness alone, or by the remission of sins alone, excluding grace and charity which is poured into their hearts by the Holy Spirit and inheres in them, or also that the grace which jus-

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tifies us is only the favour of God’ (canon , CF ; DS ); and secondly, relating to various denials of the possibility or necessity of a Christian’s observing the commandments (canons –, CF –; DS –). Neither Luther nor Calvin would have had any great difficulty with the latter canons (–); they would in different ways have taken issues with the use of Gal : in the main text and with canon . This was by no means an uncontested issue at Trent, and there were those like Girolamo Seripando, the General of the Augustinian Order at the Council, who defended a doctrine of duplex iustitia according to which men and women were justified by both imputed and inherent righteousness. While earlier drafts of the constitution on justification seemed to allow such a view, the final version with its canon seems to be designed to exclude it. To talk about justification solely on the basis of Christ’s righteousness is erroneous (see McGrath : –). It is certain that Calvin (and Melanchthon) would have objected vehemently: justification was on the basis of Christ’s merits and therefore quite independent of any change or regeneration in the believer. Luther’s views, with his constant concern for the union of the believer with Christ and the believer’s consequent transformation, appear closer to Seripando’s, and in this sense to give evidence of his own Augustinian formation. What is also interesting here is that the decree itself largely avoids the language of scholasticism and lays much greater weight on the scriptural texts. In this respect, it forfeits a certain precision, while at the same time laying emphasis on the appropriation of the gifts of God’s grace and love in the work of the Spirit.

Perkins Perkins gives a remarkable reading of :, remarkable not least because of the emphasis he ultimately puts on human bondage in a text which had stood as providing a charter for Christian liberty. He is also, in large part, concerned to counter the teachings of the Council of Trent. In the first instance, he answers the Catholic charge that Reformed doctrine teaches ‘that a man must conceive a perswasion that hee is in the favour of God the adopted child of God: and that upon this perswasion hee hath the pardon of his sins, and the benefit of Christian liberty’. Perkins counters by saying that they teach that ‘the application of Christ and his benefits, is to be made by certaine degrees’. Faith, as understood by Protestants, is not to be seen as a simple persuasion but as something which requires serious application before one can ‘experience the goodnesse of God after long use of the meanes of salvation, and then upon this experience follows the full perswasion of mercy and forgiveness’. True faith is conditional upon such experience of God’s goodness, and this introduces a new affective element

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into the understanding of faith, one which while it is itself pure gift, comes as the result of great spiritual endeavour on the part of the believer. This has two consequences: on the one hand, it leads him to stress the active involvement of the will in the life of faith. In discussion of v.  he notes that Catholics translate the Greek in v.  not as ‘faith working through love’ but as faith ‘acted and mooved by love’, taking energoumenē as a passive rather than a middle. Perkins counters that the true meaning is that ‘faith is effectuall in it selfe: and that it shewes and puts foorth his efficacy by love, as by the fruite thereof ’ (Perkins : ). We must not only ‘labour to conceive faith aright in our hearts’, as we have already seen, but once faith reigns in our hearts, then it is all powerful and must ‘have the command over reason, will affection, lust’ (Perkins : ). Faith it is which is the cause of love (not the other way round), which is ‘lively and effectuall in itselfe’. Faith and love are not, as in Catholic doctrine, joint ‘causes in the justification of a sinner’ (Perkins : ). To suggest that Paul attributes justification to the operation of love would be to go against the central teaching of the epistle, that justification is not by works. Rather, ‘faith and love are two hands of our soule. Faith is an hand that laies hold of Christ, and it doth (as it were) pull him and his benefits into our soules. But love is an hand of another kind, for it serves not to receive in, but to give out the good it hath, and to communicate itselfe unto others’ (Perkins : ). Such love is part of sanctification, which is consequent upon our justification, and which is not something Perkins considers believers have great experience of in this life. This last thought is brought out clearly in Perkins’s treatment of our waiting for the hope of righteousness in v. . Faith apprehends the promise, and thereby brings foorth hope: and faith by means of hope, makes them that beleeve to waite. . . . Righteousness is indeed imputed to them that beleeve, and that in this life, yet the fruition and the full revelation thereof is reserved to the life to come, when Christ our righteousness shall appeare, and when the effect of righteousnesse, namely sanctification, shall be accomplished in us. (Perkins : )

This doctrine is said to be ‘comfort for the godly’ when they ‘complaine of the want of sanctification: but they are to know, that in this life they shall never feele righteousnesse, as they feele sinne: here they must hunger and thirst after righteousnesse, living in some want of it’. All we can expect, and must be content with for the present, is the first-fruits of the spirit, ‘the hatred of our owne sinne, the purpose of not sinning, the feare of God, and such like’. For the rest we must ‘wait for the fruition of further grace until the life to come’ (Perkins : –): a rather cheerless prospect.

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Nineteenth- and twentieth-century readings Baur had put great emphasis on the new self-consciousness which emerges in Pauline Christianity, arguing that the Christian ‘has within him the spirit, an essentially spiritual principle, which forbids him to regard anything merely outward as in any way a condition of his salvation; that he is conscious of his immediate communion and union with God’ (Baur : ). The present passage with its emphasis on the future hope of righteousness might be thought to create certain problems for such a line of interpretation. It is not a passage certainly that Baur himself discusses in any detail. Hilgenfeld in his reading of the text does nothing to reduce this apparent tension in Paul’s thought. He takes v.  to mean: ‘we . . . through the Spirit, this pledge of future redemption, out of our faith, as the corresponding condition from our side, await the hope of righteousness.’ He takes the phrase ‘hope of righteousness’ to mean ‘the (objective) hope, which consists in righteousness, or the hoped-for righteousness itself ’. He accepts that it may indeed seem surprising that, ‘in contrast to the righteousness of the Law, true righteousness does not seem to be immediately given with faith’. But this should no more surprise us than the fact that in Gal : and :, the sonship which has already appeared is nevertheless seen in Rom : as ‘something future, something still awaited’. Hilgenfeld is in no way disconcerted. ‘The truly Pauline self-confidence of faith is easily compatible with the expectation of a future moment of judgement ( Cor :), with the hope of a future open recognition and the full reward of the righteousness of faith.’ Precisely at this point, with its contrast between the two forms of righteousness, it would have been particularly appropriate for Paul ‘to emphasise the humility of Christian hope’. In this way, it becomes all the clearer that, for those who are in communion with Christ, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision have any importance, but ‘only faith which is active in and proves itself in love’ (Hilgenfeld : ). The ‘old Catholic’ passive reading of energeisthai is rejected in favour of the middle, which is the invariable way it is taken in the New Testament (cf.  Cor :; :; Rom :; Eph :; Hilgenfeld : , n. ). Lightfoot’s reading shows all his virtues, in its careful construal of Paul’s Greek. He is alert to its emphases. Is ‘I, Paul’, an ‘assertion of authority’ or an ‘indirect refutation of calumnies’? Or indeed both? What is the exact force of the present participle peritemnomenoi and the related present tenses of the verb in : and :? ‘It is not the fact of their having been circumcized which St. Paul condemns, (for this is indifferent in itself), but the fact of their allowing themselves to be circumcized, being free agents’ (Lightfoot : ). The word apekdechometha, v. , is taken as ‘waiting eagerly’ or perhaps ‘patiently’, and is used by Paul ‘especially in speaking of future redemption’. The phrase ‘by the Spirit’ in v.  is picked up by the ‘for’ in v. , ‘for the dispositions of the



Galatians 

flesh, such as circumcision or uncircumcision, are indifferent’; what matters is ‘faith working by love’, ‘which is all powerful in Christ Jesus’. In this sense Paul qualifies his earlier straightforward condemnation of circumcision. ‘Circumcision is neither better nor worse than uncircumcision in itself (see especially  Cor. vii. –, Gal. vi. ). The false sentiment which attends it, the glorying in the flesh, makes the difference, and calls down the rebuke.’ Thus Lightfoot agrees that the key expression in this passage is indeed the phrase ‘faith working through love’ and he quotes, presumably with approval, Bengel’s phrase: ‘the whole of Christianity is found in these words’. But what does he himself say about them? He makes the same point as Hilgenfeld about the use of the middle voice corresponding to Paul’s ‘general use’, unlike the use in the Fathers (quoting Tertullian, Marc. ., where it appears to be taken as ‘being perfected through love’). On this basis, so Lightfoot, the passage does not express the doctrine of fides caritate formata. Rather, the phrase ‘bridge[s] over the gulf which seems to separate the language of St Paul and St James. Both assert a principle of practical energy, as opposed to a barren, inactive theory’ (Lightfoot : ). This, coupled with a note to the effect that here as elsewhere in Paul, faith, hope and love are linked, is as far as Lightfoot goes in discussing the great theological tradition of interpretation of these verses, which he knew as well as anyone. It is worth pointing out that the tradition of taking v.  as support for the doctrine of fides caritate formata does not depend on taking energoumenē as passive, which is not how it is understood by Aquinas (: ; : ), nor indeed by Cardinal Pole, who translates the phrase, when quoting Basil, into Latin as fides per dilectionem operans (i.e. using the active form) and into English, when quoting the text of Trent as ‘faith that worketh through charitie’ (Pole  []: , ). The Latin of the Vulgate could allow a passive translation, but is again much more easily taken as a middle. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that what Lightfoot is developing is a reading style which limits itself to what can be said with confidence on the basis of careful philology and which therefore refuses, or perhaps more correctly, finds itself unable to read as the tradition had read, accepting the challenges of Paul’s ambiguity and indeterminacy and developing his hints and suggestions by teasing out their possible theological implications. The period after the publication of Lightfoot’s commentary saw the development of a much greater understanding of Jewish apocalyptic thought and its bearing on Paul’s thought. The immediate champions of such an approach were Wrede () and Schweitzer (); however, it was not until Käsemann () and Sanders () that such questions gained due recognition among the mainstream of Western European and North American scholarship. Paul’s statement in v.  that believers wait in the Spirit for the hope of righteousness gains a particular resonance once it is read against the background of beliefs

Galatians 



in a general resurrection and a final assize in which the present evil age will be terminated and a new age inaugurated. For Schweitzer, Paul’s belief that Jesus had already been resurrected in advance of the general resurrection means that he had to modify this schema. In consequence, he thought of Christians living in the period in which the two ages overlapped. They were already in a sense living in the new age, but the old age was still active, and salvation in its fullest sense would not be achieved until the end. Despite this, the portrayal of righteousness as something lying in the future comes as a surprise in this letter with its strong emphasis on the fact that those who believe in the Gospel are already justified. Martyn (b: –) is particularly alert to this, reading it, following his friend Käsemann, as indicating that they are involved in a process whereby, through the church, the world is gradually brought back under God’s rule: ‘In short, God’s deed of rectification – accomplished in Christ – is still finding its concrete form in the daily life of the church, as the church expands into the whole of the world.’ And he quotes Käsemann: Rectification ‘is to be had on earth only as a pledged gift, always subject to attack, always to be authenticated in practice – a matter of promise and expectation’ (Käsemann : ). By contrast with this historicizing reading of Schweitzer’s eschatological schema, Sanders (: ) sees in the difference tenses of justification language in Paul an indication that Paul does not have a single concept of righteousness: ‘“Righteousness by faith”, in other words, is not any one doctrine. It is the heuristic category employed by Paul against the notion that obedience to the law is necessary.’ This certainly gets away from the problems of having to discuss what it might mean or how these different doctrines relate; but simply looking at the function of an utterance does not absolve one of the need to ask what its sense is: it is difficult to see how it could fill its heuristic role without some kind of sense content. There is a broad consensus that ‘faith working through love’ is to be taken as middle and refers to the works which faith produces. The fact that Paul opposes works of the Law does not mean that he believes that believers should produce no works at all. Verse , for John Barclay, summarizes Paul’s arguments in the preceding sections, not just allowing an exception from circumcision for Gentile converts but offering ‘a far-reaching redefinition of the identity-markers of the people of God: what is decisive now is being in Christ, possessing the Spirit and having a faith which works through love’. This broadly sociological, functional account is, however, supported by an extended examination of what is expected from those who are so described. The present point is that ‘this definition of identity has an active emphasis – faith must work through love’. The Abrahamic family may be free from the yoke of the Law, but ‘they are not free from the obligation to work’ (Barclay : ).





Galatians 

New Life in the Spirit

Paul presents Christian life as flowing organically from participation in the Spirit, the believers’ union with Christ: Christians are ‘led by the Spirit,’ and so bear ‘the fruit of the Spirit.’ The problem with the latter position, which would have done very well as a straight contrast with the legal position of his opponents, is that the Galatians, who ‘started in the Spirit’ are not ‘walking in the Spirit’ as Paul would have liked, are not showing much evidence of ‘love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, humility and self-control’. They are rather ‘biting and devouring one another’. So, as many commentators have noted (Bultmann ), there is a considerable tension in Paul’s remarks at this point between what is on the one hand descriptive language: (true) Christians participate in the Spirit and bear the fruit of the Spirit; and, on the other, prescriptive language: ‘fulfil the Law’: ‘walk in the Spirit’; ‘let us have no selfconceit’; ‘bear one another’s burdens’, and the like. All this comes to a head in a passage of wonderful complexity, :–: But I say, walk by the Spirit, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you would. But if you are led by the Spirit you are not under the law.

Apart from the tensions between imperative and indicative mode which we have just noted – ‘walk by the Spirit’, ‘if you are led by the Spirit’ – there is a serious lack of precision in a number of the terms used, together with some straightforward ambiguity. ‘Flesh’ and ‘Spirit’ as an opposed pair are clearly terms which have a wide range of meaning in the language of the time. ‘Flesh’ is not conceived of simply as physical matter which provides the outer covering of animals and human beings, though it can certainly have such a sense. More generally, it can refer to the human body, a human person, or to human or mortal nature. By extension, it can refer to the external or outward aspect of life. More negatively, flesh can be understood as the seat of human desires, sometimes of specifically sexual desires, more widely of desires which are disordered or sinful. The negative aspects of the flesh may be attributed to the human will, which allows the desires to influence it unduly, or to the spiritual being who created it. ‘Spirit’ can refer both to the human and the divine spirit. When spirit and flesh are contrasted, as here, are they contrasted as bad and good; as natural, supernatural, ‘things above’, ‘things below’, transitory, eternal? To add to the complexity, here they appear to be personified: they have desires and ‘desire against each other’. Are they supernatural forces, of corruption and

Galatians 

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good, wreaking havoc and bringing salvation to an evil world (:); or is the personification just a figure of speech, referring, as Aquinas has it, to the soul as influenced by desires attaching to the flesh, natural desires? Nor is it altogether clear what is meant by saying that flesh and spirit are ‘opposed’ to each other. It could mean ‘logically distinct from’ or ‘engaged in conflict with’ (or something in between). The purpose/result of the opposition between the flesh and the spirit is said to be ‘that [‘in order that’ or ‘with the result that’?] you may not do what you want’. Does this mean the good/the bad/ or simply anything that you want? Is the result – or at least the intention – that those who are led by/walk in the Spirit do not do the good, the bad, or indeed are unable to do anything of their own volition at all? Finally, arising out of these points, the question arises as to what is to be done: what, concretely, in terms of actual behaviour, is it to ‘walk in the Spirit’? As Baur was keen to point out, this text comes at a crucial juncture of the history of Christianity: here a significant part of the church makes the crucial move, from a religion based on a particular legal code taken from the traditions of a particular people, to a religion based on the Spirit which claims to unite people of all nations. Its importance has been clearly seen by subsequent Christian interpreters; its ambiguity has led to a rich range of interpretation and, in consequence, of different Christian communities.

The Commentators Dualist readings There are a cluster of readings of a strongly dualist kind whose origins are within the complex of groupings which emerge from the second century onwards: Gnostic, Marcionite, Manichaean. According to these readings the flesh is to be understood as a manifestation of the principle of evil, which is contrasted to and wholly distinct from the good God. As such, it is to be rooted out/allowed to perish. The initiate who is illuminated by such teaching is able to escape from his/her entanglement in the world of darkness and attain to a life of goodness by abandoning all that belongs to the world of evil. One particularly striking example of this kind of reading is to be found in The Gospel of Philip (; Layton : –), a third-century collection of Gnostic sayings, which argues that exposing the root of evil will cause the tree of evil itself to wither and die and which appears to quote Gal : as descriptive of the human condition before such illumination. Therefore



Galatians 

let each of us, too, burrow for the root of evil that is within, and root it up from his or her heart. It will be rooted up when it is recognized. But if we are ignorant of it, it sinks its root within us and yields its crops within our hearts; dominates us; we are its slaves; it takes us captive so that we do the things we do [not] want and do [not] do the things that we want; and [it] grows powerful because we have not recognised it. So long as [it exists] it is active.’ This ‘lack of [acquaintance, i.e., recognition of the root of evil] is the mother of [all evils] . . . Lack of acquaintance is a slave: acquaintance is freedom.

In a similar manner, Fortunatus, Augustine’s Manichaean opponent in North Africa, on the / August , appeals to Gal : to underscore his point that evil does not derive from human cupiditas/desiring, but from the work of the evil principle which is wholly opposed to the good, including the good soul, which is incorruptible. So he cites Gal :, along with Rom :; :–, as evidence that there is an alien principle at work in human beings, the ‘prudentia carnis’, the mind of the flesh, so that the soul appears to sin (peccare videtur, non sua sponte; Augustine : ), whereas in fact it is acting under the ‘constraint of a substance which is contrary to us’ (contraria et inimica nobis substantia; Augustine : ); if there were no such ‘contrary nation’ (gens contraria; Augustine : ), then the soul would be without sin. Only when the soul is freed from the constraints of this alien principle by the knowledge of its heavenly origin, can it be said to sin (Jn :; Augustine : ), such that repentance and the struggle to preserve the purity of the soul is a matter for the soul after its salvation, not before it. For Fortunatus, then, the war of the flesh against the spirit is part of the Christian condition, as the pure soul continues to do battle with the alien principle at work in its flesh. In this he takes a position quite different from that of The Gospel of Philip. Practically, those who read Gal :– in these kinds of way, take ‘crucifying the flesh’ and ‘not fulfilling its desires’ to refer to various forms of asceticism. The Gospel of Philip links the salvation of the believer with a bridal chamber ritual which is undergone by a man and a woman, who ‘represent the Gnostic and his angelic counterpart with whom he is to be united in the Pleroma’ (Wilson : ). According to The Gospel of Philip, the ‘males are they that unite with the souls that inhabit a female form . . . so if the image and the angel are united with one another, neither can any venture to go into the man or the woman’ (Gosp. Phil. .–, –). Foster comments: ‘Christ’s soteriological function is to repair this ‘gender-based’ fracturing of the whole being, which was brought about through carnal intercourse. Reunification occurs in the bridal chamber.’ (Foster : ) Those who have been through the bridal chamber ritual subsequently lead a life of sexual abstinence. In this context, crucifixion ‘symbolises the release of the pneumatic [spiritual] from the hylic [material] and cosmic elements’ (Pagels : , citing Irenaeus, AH

Galatians 



..; ANF . and Gosp. Phil. , in Layton : ). The Encratites (Irenaeus, AH .; ANF .), a second-century group associated with Tatian, and, according to Irenaeus, deriving from Marcion, abstained from marriage, meat and alcohol, and may well have drawn their name from Paul’s inclusion of enkrateia (self-control) among the fruit of the Spirit. The Manichees also abstained from meat and sexual intercourse, or, more specifically, procreation. Because for them matter was evil, the Manichaean elect should refrain from all acts which would perpetuate the physical world and its bondage of the divine (procreation), just as it should (in principle) refrain from eating food because the divine was imprisoned within it (Böhlig : , ). Such ascetic tendencies were, however, by no means restricted to dualist groups but were widespread in other forms of Christianity. These strong dualist readings with their quite divergent cosmologies (cosmogonies), were widely propagated and widely influential (Augustine himself had been a Manichaean ‘hearer’), and much early Christian orthodox interpretation of Scripture presupposes and reacts against them.

Augustine For Augustine, the problem of Christian ethics is not simply one of which course to follow but, at a more fundamental level, one of how the believer is to be enabled to do that which he/she wills to do. In commenting on :, he starts by rejecting the (Manichaean) suggestion that Paul is here denying outright the freedom of the will to do what it wants (liberum voluntatis arbitrium; Augustine : , cf. Babcock ). Paul, he insists, does not wholly rule out the possibility of Christians willingly doing what is right: they can do so if they ‘hold on to the grace of faith they have received, which alone enables them to ‘walk in the Spirit and not fulfil the lusts of the flesh’(Augustine : ). Otherwise, they will indeed not be able to do what they want. Only those who are strengthened by grace can do what is right. To make his position clear, Augustine outlines a historical schema of four stages in which the will operates or is able to operate quite differently. (i) Before the coming of the Law, no evil is prohibited, and so people ‘do not resist corrupt longings in any respect’. (ii) Under the Law prior to grace, a person ‘tries not to sin but is defeated because he does not yet love righteousness for the sake of God and for the sake of righteousness itself, but wants it to serve him in procuring earthly things.’ (iii) Under grace, because of spiritual love, ‘no temporal comfort is preferred to righteousness’. In this stage, there is still spiritual conflict, because on the one hand we serve the law of God with the mind, while, on the other, ‘penal habit’ draws us to sin. As Plumer suggests, such habit is defined in Simpl. .. (CCSL ..–), ‘as the



Galatians 

“addiction to pleasure” (adsiduitas voluptatis) that comes about as the penalty . . . of repeated sinning (poena frequentati peccati)’ (Augustine :  n. ). (iv) Finally, there is peace when the Spirit of Jesus dwells in us. Such a state does not yet exist, ‘[f]or only when the body is transformed into an immortal state will there be no lusts of the flesh’ (Augustine : –). So in v. , Paul is speaking specifically about Christians, but not describing the proper state of Christians, but rather the state of those who, despite the force of sinful habit, succeed in holding on to the grace of faith they have received. Under the Law they were too weak to resist the (fleshly) desire for earthly goods; now they are able to rise above such desires, because of the love of righteousness with which they are inspired, and which is integral to the faith which they have been graciously given. Thus faith, with its love of righteousness, strengthens the will and makes it possible for the believer to escape the due penalty for sin: ‘because the penalty is visited not on the one engaged in battle but on the one defeated in battle’ (Augustine : ). This is a clearly synergistic view of grace, where grace, through the gift of faith working through love as opposed to fear, enables the will, weakened by the force of habit, to overcome its sinful inclinations. The disorder caused by the undue power which fleshly desires have over the will is overcome by the action of the grace on the human will. Thus, so Augustine, Paul can speak of those who are in Christ Jesus, having ‘crucified their flesh with its passions and lusts’, v. , meaning that they have crucified it ‘by that fear which is pure and endures for ever (Ps :), whereby we are careful not to offend him whom we love with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our mind’ (Augustine : ).

Chrysostom Chrysostom was also keenly aware of the threat to Church unity and teaching posed by the Manichaeans, and this has clearly observable implications for his reading of Paul. In treating the language of flesh in chapter , he is keen to distance himself from Manichaean notions of the inherent sinfulness of the body and of human sexuality. It is not, as the Manichaeans claim, that the body derives from an evil principle: ‘in truth neither the eye, nor any other part of us is to blame, but the depraved choice of the will (proairesis) only’ (NPNF .). This claim is supported in his discussion of : by further arguments: (a) the phrase, the ‘flesh lusts against the spirit’, cannot be predicated of the body, for ‘the body moves not, but is moved, is not an agent but is acted upon’ (NPNF .); (b) scriptural proof of the form that when the Scriptures speak of something lusting or desiring, it is the soul (Ps :) or the heart (Ps :) which is the subject. What Paul refers to when he speaks of the flesh lusting against the

Galatians 

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Spirit, then, is the depraved action of the will, ‘earthly mind (logismos), slothful and careless’ (NPNF .). Thus, in rejecting Manichaean accounts of the origins of evil, Chrysostom is also setting aside the dualist aspects of Paul’s thought, which are strongly represented in Galatians. The source of evil resides in the exercise of free will, in human choice. In this he can rightly appeal both to Greek philosophical tradition and to those elements in the biblical literature, well represented in the Wisdom literature and the Psalms, which stress human responsibility for evil deeds. What, then, of the meaning of ‘spirit’? The problem is this. If Paul speaks of the flesh, that is the corrupt will, being at war with the spirit, is he suggesting that the human person is divided in itself? Or is he suggesting that ‘spirit’ is not a way of speaking about a particular state of the human mind or will, but rather refers to the activity or grace of God? Chrysostom’s answer is clear: ‘In his expression “the flesh lusteth against the spirit” he (Paul) means two mental states, logismoi. For these are opposed to each other, namely virtue and vice, not the soul and the body’ (NPNF .). The opposition, that is to say, is not a division within the soul itself, but rather, Paul is referring to acts of mind, judgements, which are mutually exclusive, contradictory options between which the soul has to choose. What Paul is referring to is not, Chrysostom writes, the opposition of soul and body, but ‘the contrast of good and bad principles, logismoi. (Compare Rom. vii: ). To will and not to will belongs to the soul; wherefore he says, “these are contrary the one to the other”’ (NPNF.). What, then, is the outcome of this contest? How does Chrysostom resolve the ambiguity of ‘to prevent you from doing what you would’? Is it the good things that they will, which they will be prevented from doing, or the bad? Chrysostom is clear what it means: ‘these things are contrary the one to another’ – good and bad ethical arguments (logismoi) are clearly distinguished and contrasted – ‘that you may not suffer the soul to proceed in its evil desires’ (NPNF .). Paul is speaking ‘like a Master and a Teacher in a threatening way’, in order to encourage them; he is not engaging in existential analysis; he is insisting that it is necessary to distinguish virtue and vice clearly, lest evil desires should get the upper hand, and that the choice lies clearly with them. In arguing in this way, Chrysostom draws on his Stoic philosophical formation. Thus Seneca, ep. ., argues that philosophy ‘shows us what things are evil and what things are seemingly evil; she strips our minds of vain illusion. She bestows upon us a greatness which is substantial, but she represses the greatness which is inflated and showy but filled with emptiness.’ Similarly, Musonius Rufus states that the task of philosophy is ‘to find out by discussion what is fitting and proper and then to carry it out in action’ (both quoted in Wilken : ). For Chrysostom, it is the Spirit who is for the Christian the true philosopher,

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Galatians 

teaching believers the true nature of good and evil, in a way more subtle and sophisticated than the simple lessons of the grammarian, in which role he casts the Law. Just as previously the Law taught the people of God the elementary matters of right and wrong, now they have moved on to the higher school of the Spirit. This is a gentler school than that of the Law: ‘As horses, who are docile and do everything of their own accord, need not the lash, so neither does the soul, which by the Spirit has attained to excellence, need the admonitions of the Law. Here too he completely and strikingly casts out the Law, not as bad, but as inferior to the philosophy given by the Spirit’ (NPNF .). Chrysostom, like Augustine, sees the fruit of the Spirit as resulting from the action of both the soul and the Spirit. The soul is not superfluous in the exercise of virtue: ‘for the mastery of the passions (enkrateia tōn pathōn) belongs to her, and concerns her; and being placed amid vice and virtue, if she has used the body fitly, she has wrought it to be spiritual, but if she separate from the Spirit and give herself up to evil desires, she makes herself more earthly’. On the other hand, the fruit of the Spirit is not the product of the soul alone: ‘good works require not only our diligence but God’s loving kindness’. Here too there is a synergy between the soul and the Spirit. There is nevertheless a strong emphasis on the mastery of the passions, to which Chrysostom returns in his discussion of v. . Those who exercise such control ‘have attained to this perfection’, not by physically destroying the flesh but by overcoming the desires, however troublesome (NPNF .). Thus Chrysostom opens up the text by developing an anthropology based on a firm belief in the power of the will in sharp antithesis to the Manichaean stress on the inherent depravity of the flesh and the Law. Chrysostom counters such views by asserting that the soul is essentially good, as is the flesh; only in its actions, its freely willed choices, is it sinful. And from this it follows clearly enough that even when the soul has been freed by the gift of the Spirit from its direction towards fleshly desires, it must still follow the good and will to do it. In this respect, it requires, above all, the guidance and instruction of the Spirit. In sum, Chrysostom has produced a coherent and powerful reading of Galatians, which is in line with the orthodoxy which he wishes to promote, carefully distinguished from the views of the heterodox Manichaeans, but a reading which is achieved at the cost of screening out the darker, dualist side of Paul’s thought.

Thomas Aquinas Aquinas draws on the synergistic tradition which we have seen in its different forms in Chrysostom and Augustine, where the virtuous actions of Christians are seen to be the outcome of the co-operation of the soul and divine grace.

Galatians 

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Aquinas understands the desire of the flesh/spirit to refer to the active willing of the soul in seeking those things which are desirable to the flesh/spirit. Here flesh and spirit are taken to refer to the natural and the supernatural spheres respectively. Christians are called to liberty, which involves serving one another in love. In vv. – Paul deals with the ‘cause’ of this life of freedom in the Spirit by treating the benefits which it confers: freedom from the bondage of the flesh, from the bondage of the Law, and from damnation. He notes a certain ambiguity in the phrase ‘walking in the spirit/Spirit’. It can refer either to the activities of the mind and reason or to the activity of the Spirit in ‘mov[ing] and incit[ing] hearts to do well’ (Aquinas : ; : –). So, combining these two senses, Aquinas comes up with a view of the co-operation between the mind and the Spirit: ‘One should walk, therefore, by the spirit, i.e., the mind, so that one’s reason or mind is in accord with the Law of God’ (Aquinas : ; : ; referring here to Rom :). Only when human reason is governed, which is to say, guided and animated by the Spirit, can it ‘stand perfectly’. Specifically, only the Spirit brings knowledge of our supernatural end; it also ‘stirs up and turns our affections to right willing’ (Aquinas : ; : ). What, then, of the opposition between the desires of the saints, inspired by the Spirit, and ‘the desires to which the flesh stirs them’? Whereas Chrysostom had seen the distinction here as one between good and evil principles of action, between which the believer has to choose, Aquinas makes a further distinction between desires of the flesh which pertain to that which is necessary and those that pertain to what is superfluous. There is nothing wrong with meeting our basic physical needs, but we must not desire such things immoderately; nor must we allow the pursuit of necessary material needs to distract us from our spiritual goals. ‘For since the pleasures of the flesh concern goods which are beneath us, whereas the pleasures of the spirit concern goods which are above us, it comes to pass that when the soul is occupied with the lower things of the flesh, it is withdrawn from the higher things of the spirit’ (Aquinas : –; : ). Clearly what emerges from this, as with Chrysostom, is a view of the Christian life as one of spiritual discipline and struggle, where however the standards are set not by the Law but by the Spirit (which, according to Aquinas, liberates believers from the coercive but not the obligating force of the Law; : ; : –). For Aquinas, however, the outcome is never assured. Experience teaches that the struggle between the flesh and the spirit means that we never altogether do what we want, good or bad. I may be able to avoid this or that impulse of desire or anger, but I cannot avoid them all, because of the corruption which was introduced by the first sin (Aquinas : ; : ). Thus, when he comes to talk of the ‘crucifixion of the flesh’, he introduces the language of Christian asceticism: vigils, fasting and works by which the flesh

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Galatians 

may be tamed. Careful to distance himself from Manichaeism, he insists that the crucifixion of the flesh does not mean the destruction of its nature (Eph :), but only the destruction of those aspects which are contrary to the law, its sins and the passions which incline it to sin (Aquinas : ; : ).

Luther For Luther, the underlying problem with such synergistic interpretations was that they still effectively left the Christian believer under the judgement of God. Worse, Paul’s statement in v.  that ‘the whole law is fulfilled in one word’ seems to be a flat denial of all that he has previously said in the letter. Whereas previously he had ‘take[n] away righteousness from the law’, now he seems to assert that it is ‘they which do the works of charity’ who ‘fulfil the law’ and are righteous (Luther : ; LW .). And indeed this was how Paul’s statement about love as the fulfilling of the Law was taken by the schoolmen: ‘If love be the fulfilling of the law, it followeth that love is righteousness; therefore if we love, we be righteous’ (Luther : ; LW .). Yet Luther believed, more passionately than Aquinas, that ‘all the faithful do feel that their flesh resisteth against the spirit, and that these two are so contrary the one to the other in themselves, that, do what they can, they are not able to perform that which they would do. Therefore the flesh hindereth us that we cannot keep the commandments of God, that we cannot love our neighbours as ourselves, much less can we love God with all our heart, etc.’ (Luther : ; LW .). This deep sense of the sinfulness of Christians confronted Luther with a dilemma, for he had been taught that the righteousness of God meant the active righteousness of God, that by which he judges sinners. And this to him, though central to Paul’s gospel, was no gospel at all. Only when he had come to the view that the ‘righteousness of God’ meant the righteousness which God confers on sinful men and women, could he find peace and joy. But here this confidence appears to be undermined as Paul begins to address questions of Christian conduct. Luther’s way out of this dilemma starts with his treatment of v. : ‘But I say, walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh.’ This is how Paul’s statement about love being the fulfilling of the Law is to be understood: As if he should say: When I bid you love one another, this is it that I require of you, that you walk in the Spirit. For I know that ye shall not fulfil the law: because sin dwelleth in you as long as ye live, therefore it is impossible that ye should fulfil the law. Notwithstanding, in the meanwhile endeavour yourselves diligently to walk in the Spirit, that is, wrestle in Spirit against the flesh, and follow spiritual motions, &c. (Luther : ; LW .)

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Christians are not to ‘utterly put off or destroy the flesh; but they are to bridle it, that it might be subject to the Spirit’. The flesh is to be ‘cherished’ (Rom :). ‘[W]e must cherish our flesh, that it may be able to endure the labours both of the mind and of the body: but yet only for necessity’s sake, and “not to nourish the lust thereof ”.’ This is a view which is in itself remarkably close to that of Aquinas. This is, moreover, not merely a matter of sexual abstinence and selfdiscipline: This commandment to walk in the Spirit belongeth not only to hermits and monks, but to all Christians, even though they feel no carnal desire. So the prince fulfilleth not the concupiscence of the flesh, when he diligently doth his duty and governeth his subjects well . . . Here the flesh and the devil resist, and tempt him, provoking him to make unrighteous war, to obey his own covetousness, &c.; and except he follow the leading of the Spirit and obey the good and holy admonitions of the Word of God concerning his office, then he fulfilleth the lust of the flesh, &c. So let every man in his calling walk in the Spirit, and he shall not fulfil either his carnal lust or any other of the works of the flesh. (Luther : –; LW :–)

Here, crucially, Luther undermines the distinction between the spirituality of the clergy and the religious, on the one hand, and the laity, on the other. Spiritual struggle and discipline are no longer to be modelled on the life of the monk and the ascetic, as with Chrysostom in his portrayal of Paul as a monk; rather, the struggle between the flesh and the spirit is something which characterizes the life of Christians whatever their calling (Wingren ). This then paves the way for an account of the Christian life and of the operation of the will based on Gal :. In the first place, Luther takes ‘flesh’ to refer not to carnal lust only, but to the whole person with his ‘pride, wrath, heaviness, impatience, incredulity, and such like’. These are desires which, Paul warns, ‘we shall feel’ but which we may resist. There is an internal battle within the believer; Paul wants believers ‘so to feel them that we consent not unto them, nor accomplish them: that is, that we neither think, speak, nor do those things which the flesh provoketh us unto. As, if it move us to anger, yet we should be angry in such wise as we are taught in the fourth Psalm, that we sin not.’ In this way, the saying is to be understood ‘not of fleshly lusts only, but of the whole kingdom of sin’ (Luther : ; LW .). A number of significant shifts in Christian sensibility are occurring in this passage. In the first place, there is a clear reassertion of the broad biblical sense of ‘lust’ and ‘flesh’ which we encountered in Chrysostom, and indeed in Aquinas, over against an ascetic form of Christianity, with its emphasis on sexual desire, which can equally appeal to Paul, not least to  Cor :, which Luther cites in this context. This is a passage which characterizes the whole range of Christian living and brings it back to the centre of theological concern.

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Secondly, Luther argues for a particular form of Christian sensibility: Christians will indeed experience such desires, but they are to experience them in a particular way, as feelings which are to be resisted, not to be followed. Further, by contrast with Chrysostom, who takes the terms to refer to different courses of action or maxims, logismoi, Luther personifies them, presenting them as forces internal to, though in conflict with each other within, the self (‘Paul describeth the battle of the flesh against the spirit in his own body’; Luther : ; LW .). There is nothing particularly original about such a move: it has precedents in Stoicism and in Paul (Rom : is a classic source for such ideas), but there is little doubt about the influence of this particular presentation as Luther lays down new patterns of Christian sensibility for generations of lay Christians in Europe and beyond. This is by no means a wholly negative view of the Christian’s ability to overcome the promptings of the ‘flesh’, but it is clearly an account of the moral ability of the Christian believer which can easily be read in different ways. For Luther, : asserts, alongside the continuing rebellion of the flesh in the Christian, the ability of the Christian in the Spirit to overcome the ‘flesh’. Yet, while the human will is freed from bondage, it is still weak and vulnerable. ‘This, therefore, is the very complaint of Paul and of all the saints’, declares Luther in opposition to those among the schoolmen and the Fathers to whom it would seem ‘absurd and unseemly to say, that the elect vessel of Christ should have sin’ (Luther : ; LW .). And even if Paul may well have resisted such notions of carnal lust, the ordinary Christian may well from time to time fail. Our ‘ground and anchor-hold’, however, must be in Christ, ‘our only perfect righteousness’ in whom we hope and believe (Luther : ; LW .). In this life, that is to say, we cannot hope wholly to subdue the flesh: through the Spirit we must struggle to overcome the flesh; but if we do fail, we can still raise ourselves up by faith. Luther comes close to the kind of Marcionite/Gnostic dualism which sees the world of matter as evil, when he writes: I do not require of you that you should utterly put off the flesh or kill it, but that you should bridle and subdue it. For God will have mankind to endure even to the last day. And this cannot be done without parents, which do beget and bring up children. These means continuing, it must needs be that flesh must also continue, and consequently sin, for flesh is not without sin. Therefore in respect of the flesh we are sinners; but in respect of the Spirit, we are righteous. Notwithstanding our righteousness is much more plentiful than our sin, because the holiness and righteousness of Christ our mediator doth far exceed the sin of the whole world; and the forgiveness of sins which we have through him is so great, so large, so infinite, that it easily swalloweth up all sins, if so be that we walk according to the Spirit. (Luther : –; LW .)

Galatians 

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Here Luther reflects the shifting rhetoric of the Pauline passage, the emphasis both on the effectiveness of the new life in the Spirit and the continuing experience of sin and failure in the Christian community (something of which, in Paul’s eyes at least, the Galatians are giving a particularly vivid demonstration). He takes seriously, that is, both Paul’s ethical injunctions and his extolling of Christian virtue, while recognizing Christian failure. Unsurprisingly, his followers will emphasize different elements in his thought.

Calvin Calvin identifies the flesh as the ‘old man’, not the lower nature in a Stoic sense. In contrasting flesh and spirit, that is to say, Paul is contrasting the old nature of fallen humanity with ‘the renewed nature, or the grace of regeneration’. Christians are to walk in the Spirit, so that they may not ‘complete the lust of the flesh.’ But this is not to say that there is a simple transition from the one state to the other: ‘while they groan under the burden of the flesh, they are not its subjects or slaves, but strive to resist it.’ Thus when Paul refers to the opposition between the flesh and the spirit he is describing the struggle between the old man on the one hand and the ‘holy affections which God gives us (inspirat) by His grace’ on the other. This struggle, that is to say, is peculiar to the regenerate; ‘[c]arnal men have no battle with their depraved lusts, no true wish to aspire to the righteousness of God’, for there is ‘no greater agreement between [our nature] and righteousness than between fire and water. Now what drop of goodness is to be found in free will? – unless we call something good that is contrary to God’s Spirit.’ Thus he takes the ambiguous ‘so that ye may not do the things that ye would’ to mean that believers do not always follow their holy affections, even though they want to. Believers, ‘so long as they are in this life, are not so victorious that they serve God perfectly, however much they strive. The fulfilment does not correspond to their wishes and desires’ (referring to Rom :ff; Calvin : –). It is not easy to know exactly how Calvin understands the regenerate nature of the believer. If the struggle is between the holy affections implanted by God and the old nature, in what sense are believers to be identified with those affections, in what sense with their old nature? Has their ‘old nature’ been – will it be? – renewed, restored to its former goodness? If there is no ‘drop of goodness’ to be found in the free will, how can believers choose to follow the holy affections implanted in them? The answers Calvin gives to such questions show just how paradoxical his view of the believing self is. ‘And so, since the whole nature of man is rebellious and obstinate against the Spirit of God, we must labour and fight and exert our utmost energy to obey the Spirit.’ This clearly seems

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to indicate the existence of a regenerate subject distinct from the Spirit; is it also distinct from the holy affections which God implants (inspirat)? Equally, Calvin invokes earlier traditions of asceticism and spiritual discipline when he writes: ‘We must begin with denial of ourselves’ (Calvin : ). But he also adds, in his comments on v. , after saying that Christians have renounced the flesh, that the mortification of the flesh is the effect of Christ’s cross. This work does not belong to man, but it is by the grace of Christ that we have been planted into the fellowship of Christ’s death, so that we might no longer live to ourselves (Rom. .). If, by true self-denial and the destruction of the old man, we are buried with Christ, we shall enjoy the privilege of the sons of God. Not that the flesh is entirely destroyed, but it ought not to exercise dominion but should yield to the Spirit. (Calvin : )

One is reminded of Nishitani’s reading of Gal :, where the paradox of Paul’s language about the self leads him to see here a doctrine of the overcoming of the self, of ‘non-self ’ (see above pp. –). In what sense, then, do Christians do the good, bear ‘the fruit of the Spirit’? [A]ll virtues, all good and well-regulated affections, proceed from the Spirit, that is, from the grace of God and the renewed nature which we have from Christ. As if he had said: ‘Nothing but evil comes from man; nothing good comes but from the Holy Spirit.’ Examples of virtue in ‘unregenerate men’ were ‘all only deceptive masks . . . In the sight of God nothing is pure but what proceeds from the fountain of all purity. (Calvin : )

But again the paradox is there: alongside the emphasis on God as the sole source of acts of virtue is the reference to the renewed nature that we have from Christ. In this sense Calvin shows himself to be a sensitive reader of Paul, alert to the paradoxes which his master employs to express the new existence he enjoys ‘in Christ’. It is not at all easy to compare Luther and Calvin at this point, insofar as neither of them offers an entirely coherent, self-consistent account of the new existence in Christ. Certainly both agree in depicting Christian moral experience as one of struggle and not simply of choice between contrasting moral options (Chrysostom), or of establishing a proper hierarchy of relations between natural and supernatural desires (Aquinas). On the other hand, they offer intriguingly different pictures of the nature of the moral conflict within the believer. For Luther this is presented (at least in one account) in terms of conflicting powers within the human body (self?), such that one can speak of a divided self, where, however, the believer as united to Christ can triumph over

Galatians 

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the conflicting ‘motions’ that he/ she experiences. For Calvin, at one extreme, Christian existence is a struggle between the ‘old self ’, which is ‘the depravity of the corrupt nature, from which all evils proceed’ (Calvin : ), and the Spirit who implants holy affections. It is certainly difficult to see what account Calvin is offering here of the new, regenerate self.

Perkins Perkins takes v.  as the starting point for the second part of the epistle, ‘touching good life’. Specifically, it contains ‘the summe of [Paul’s] doctrine; . . . Brethren, yee have been called to libertie’ and sets out two rules for Christian life: ‘use not your libertie as an occasion to the flesh and doe service one to another by love.’ Whereas Calvin has treated this verse without reference to the doctrine of election, Perkins uses it as an opportunity to present it as the sum of Paul’s teaching. God the Father in Christ by the Spirit calls whom he will out of darkness. God calls all, but he does not call all in the same way: The calling of God is directed first of all and principally to the Elect; and then in the second place it pertaines to them which are not Elect, because they are mixed in society with the Elect. And hence ariseth a distinction of the calling of God, sometime it is operative: because God signifies and withall works his will in the Elect: sometimes againe in respect of others it is onely significative, when God reveals his will to men, but spares to work it for just causes known to himselfe.

Perkins is painfully conscious of the fact that not all those who profess Christian faith are serious about their profession. He distinguishes in God’s call between the invitation to the kingdom of grace and admission to it. Admission is outward, in baptism, and inward, ‘when men are taken out of old Adam, and by faith ingrafted into Christ: for by this insition into Christ, men are made reall members of Gods kingdome’. The grounds of this concern are clearly stated: Wee in England have heard the calling of God more then forty years: and yet very few of us are mooved to change and amend our lives. This shewes our Atheisme and unbeleefe: here is almost nothing but heaving, and shoving, and lifting for the world. Some are held captives of their covetousnesse, some of their pride, some of their damnable and fleshly lusts: and all this shewes that few or none, so much as dreame of a calling to spiritual libertie. (Perkins : –)

Calvin’s attack on human/free will and his rooting of good works in the inspiration of the Spirit, along with Perkins’s emphasis on the doctrine of predestination, makes ethical appeal particularly difficult.

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Perkins’s answer is to take Paul’s injunction to walk in the Spirit to refer to the gift of regeneration, which the Spirit ‘worketh . . . immediatly in us’. This gift ‘mortifies corruption’, as opposed to the gift of the civil virtues, which serve only to restrain, which proceed from the general providence of God (Perkins : ). This is an interesting counter to Calvin’s description of such virtues as masks, and is further developed by Perkins in terms of a distinction between the grace of creation and the Spirit of grace in Christians (Perkins : ), ideas which will be taken up later in notions of common grace (Berkouwer : –), though they also have some basis in Calvin’s discussions of human nature in the Institutes (II.II.). Perkins’s account of the leading of the Spirit is remarkable not only for its positive portrayal of the outworking of the gift of the Spirit in the Christian life, but also for the way that he then introduces the notion of degrees of realization of these gifts, which allows him to bring notions of perseverance and the application of the will into the discussion. The Spirit is a ‘Divine nature, quality, or condition, whereby we are made conformable to Christ, in righteousnes, and holines.’ It ‘comes in the roome of originall sinne’ and is ‘in all the powers of them that are regenerate, that is, in the mind, conscience, wil, affections, and in the sensuall appetite’; it is the source of Christian sincerity, thus distinguishing Christians from hypocrites; it is more excellent than the gifts of creation, because it brings ‘both the will to persevere and the deed’ (Perkins : –). But its effectiveness is ‘by certaine degrees’. The actions of the Spirit are, first, to ‘cast down everything in us, that exalts itselfe against God,  Cor ’; the second, to ‘kindle in our hearts a care and desire of reconciliation with God in Christ’; the third, ‘to write the law in our hearts; and that is done by putting a new light of knowledge into the minde, and new inclinations into the will, and affections’. The effect of this account is to ‘see that most of us faile in our duties’ (Perkins : –). What, then, of the flesh? It refers to the ‘corruption of nature, the root of all sinnes’. Nevertheless, though the believer is assaulted by the lusts of the flesh, he ‘does not accomplish them’; on the other hand, the lust of the flesh is in the childe of God to the death: and consequently they doe not fulfil the law, neither can they bee justified thereby, as Popish doctrine is’ (Perkins : ). What account can then be given of the nature of the conflict between the flesh and the spirit? Who are the parties to the conflict? The flesh and the spirit are mixed together in the whole man regenerate, and in all the powers of the soule of man. Fire and water are said to be mixed in compound bodies . . . Even so the man regenerate, is not in one part flesh, and in another part spirit, but the whole mind is partly flesh, and partly spirit, and so are the will and affections throughout, partly spirituall, and partly carnall. (Perkins : )

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What is it, then, to say that ‘ye cannot doe the things which yee would’? The effect of this intermingling is that ‘the regenerate man, for affection inclines to the best things: . . . yet by reason of the flesh, failes in the doing of them’ (Perkins : ), a view which seems to run against the tenor of much of the argument. Perkins’s attempt to encourage his readers to greater moral probity and effort is something of a tour de force. He does not engage in direct moral exhortation, but rather paints an attractive and exalted picture of the life of those who walk in the Spirit and their spiritual regeneration, which encompasses the renewal of all their faculties. In this way he moves beyond Calvin’s sharp contrast between the corrupt nature of the old Adam and the spiritual affections ‘implanted’ in the believer; the Spirit is now active, restoring all the powers of the old nature, which is, equally, not conceived of in such negative terms as in Calvin. The effect of this is to allow an appeal to the better nature both of the unregenerate and of the elect. He appeals, that is to say, and in this he is faithful to Paul, to his readers to walk true to their natures. At the same time, his Calvinist heritage and his anxiousness to avoid Catholic understandings of faith working through love lead him to deny much of what he has affirmed about Christian moral progress.

Hilgenfeld For Hilgenfeld, the question which Paul addresses here, as in Romans –, concerns Christian morality in the light of its freedom from ‘every positive norm’ (Hilgenfeld : ). How is it that it does not simply degenerate into libertinism? Christian freedom provides no opportunity for the flesh (Rom :), but should rather take the form of a mutual service of love, which, as Paul would have learnt from early Christian tradition, was the fulfilment of the Law as propounded by Jesus. Love is the positive content of Christian freedom and admits no libertinism. Rather, it takes the form of a Christian slavery, which is a spiritual slavery to the other. Paul explores the nature of this vital force within Christianity by considering the role of the Spirit in Christian life, for true love and the Spirit of God are inseparable. The Spirit is the source of the love which is poured out into the believers’ hearts (Rom :). The question, however, is: who is the spirit referred to in the description of the conflict between flesh and Spirit in v. ? Romans  describes the conflict in the not yet reborn person; were that the sense here then pneuma would refer to the human spirit. But here in Galatians  Paul clearly means by pneuma the divine Spirit, for only the divine Spirit can overcome the flesh. Its power, however, is not magical; it is a living power, which proves itself in the struggle with the flesh. Nor should we

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imagine that the reborn person is wholly free of the temptations of the flesh, that its crucifixion is complete; were that so, there would be no need for the ethical exhortation here at all. There is ‘an involuntary movement’ in being filled with the Spirit, in being led, driven by it; by it one is lifted above the sphere of the Law; the Law is no longer there, it is aufgehoben (abolished, transcended) in a Hegelian sense. The two powers which battle it out in the believer produce quite different results; the fruit of the Spirit is such as ‘the law has essentially no power to produce’. Christians enjoy such a life in the Spirit because they have ‘crucified their flesh’. But this death, which is the image of Christ’s death, is something that has occurred only in principle, ‘since the task of killing the works of the flesh is a continuing one for believers’. Thus, even though the Spirit is the divine principle of life in the believers, it must still be realized in their daily commerce. There is nothing automatic, nothing ‘irresistible’, about the power of the Spirit; if there were, then the injunction to walk in the Spirit would be quite meaningless (Hilgenfeld : –).

Lightfoot Lightfoot’s approach to the passage is largely philological and pays much attention to the meaning of the vices and virtues listed in the latter part of the chapter. He addresses the wider theological and anthropological issues briefly at a number of points: in the first place he notes that in this passage the Spirit is contrasted with both the flesh and the Law. He comments: The flesh and the law are closely allied: they both move in the same element, in the sphere of outward and material things. The law is not only no safeguard against the flesh, but rather provokes it; and he who would renounce the flesh, must renounce the law also. We have here the germs of the ideas more fully developed in the Epistle to the Romans. (Lightfoot : )

He notes further that the Spirit throughout the passage ‘is evidently the Divine Spirit; for the human spirit in itself and unaided does not stand in direct antagonism to the flesh’ (referring to ‘Müller’s Doctrine of Sin, I. pp.  sqq.’). This leads him further to propose that we need to supply another verb for the Spirit, rather than ‘desires’ which is predicated of the ‘flesh’: he translates: ‘but the Spirit strives, fights against the flesh’ (Lightfoot : ). Finally, he takes the clause ‘these are opposed . . .’ as a ‘parenthetical clause, suggested by what has gone before but not bearing on the main argument’. It is an appeal to their own consciousness: ‘Have you not evidence of these two opposing principles in your own hearts? How otherwise do you not always obey the dictates of your conscience?’ (Lightfoot : –). And he finds support for this reading of ‘what

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you want’ as ‘the good things that you want’ again in Romans :, . Thus he opts for a broadly Lutheran reading of the passage, basing his arguments partly on Lutheran dogmatics and partly on Romans , read as a description of Christian, rather than pre-Christian, existence, with its continuing conflicts between desire and conscience. Further confirmation of this view of the Christian life as one of moral struggle is found in v. , which he links with both Gal :– and Rom :–. The ‘life to the Spirit,’ of which the Apostle here speaks, is an ideal rather than an actual life; it denotes a state which the Galatians were put in the way of attaining rather than one which they had already attained. Otherwise the injunction ‘walk also by the Spirit’ were superfluous. Comp. Col. iii., Ephes. iv.. This is always Paul’s way of speaking. Members of the Christian brotherhood are in his language the ‘saints’, the ‘elect,’ by virtue of their admission into the Church. It remains for them to make their profession a reality. (Lightfoot : –)

Lightfoot here is at his most Lutheran. Interestingly, his reference to Müller, a Lutheran influenced by the revival movement (Erweckungsbewegung) in Germany but interested in mediating between the biblical-Reformation understanding of sin and metaphysical and ethical discussions of human failure, perhaps indicates Lightfoot’s own theological predilections.

Recent interpretations Paul’s distinctive combination of indicative and imperative in his accounts of Christian ethics will become a major theme of later German Lutheran exegesis (Bultmann ; Riches ). Lightfoot’s reading, which regards the indicative statements as descriptions of an ideal state to be realized through the efforts of Christian believers as they struggle to follow their consciences, in one sense blunts the sharp contrast between statement and injunction, of which Bultmann asks whether it is to be seen as a genuine antinomy, ‘that is to say, that what we have are statements which are both contradictory and which yet have to be taken together, which grow out of a uniform state of affairs, and which therefore belong together substantively’ (Bultmann : ). At this point it is interesting to compare the paradoxical language used in Calvin’s and Bultmann’s enquiries into the dialectical nature of Paul’s account of Christian ethics. By focusing on this paradox at the heart of Paul’s language, commentators bring home the antinomous nature of much Christian discussion of this topic, as it veers from a synergistic to a more strictly monergistic understanding of grace. Neither one account seems wholly to satisfy commentators, who read these texts against the background of their own Christian experience.

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Galatians 

As historical studies of Galatians have developed, so commentators have also proposed different accounts of the nature of the conflict between the flesh and the spirit. We saw how Luther represented this as a conflict between two powers within the Christian ‘body’. As students of the New Testament became more familiar with the language and thought of Jewish apocalyptic writings, so they became more inclined to read this in terms of two powers warring externally to the believers, a reading which clearly has significant similarities to early dualist readings (Barclay : –; Riches : –). Contrasting Paul’s understanding of the conflict between ‘flesh’ and ‘spirit’ with Philo’s, where ‘man . . . plays host to the struggle within him between the enlightened mind and the aggressive senses and passions’ (Sandmel : ), Sanders writes: When Paul speaks of the conflict between ‘spirit’ and ‘flesh’ (Gal :–), it would be better to capitalize the two words. The conflict is between God’s Spirit and the Flesh, the power which opposes God (see especially v. ). The Spirit which is here engaged in struggle is not the human spirit at war against corporeality. . . . Paul does not present the human aspiration as being the liberation of one’s own spirit from the bodily tomb. The human need is rather to become one with Christ Jesus and to have the Spirit of God. The war, in other words, is not within one’s self, but has to do with which power one – body and soul – belongs to. . . . Put another way, Paul’s view seems to owe as much to the apocalyptic theory of two aeons as to the Hellenistic theory of the struggle between body and soul. (Sanders : –)

Martyn in his commentary on Galatians believes that Paul has developed his understanding of ‘flesh’ by contrast with the teachers (Paul’s opponents) who held to a Jewish view of the yezer basar, the ‘Impulsive Flesh’ within the individual, against which he/she must (and can) fight. Paul’s view is significantly different: ‘As the Spirit is invading the present evil age by creating the new community in which it bears its fruit of love, joy, and peace, so the Flesh has its major locus of action in the community, not in the individual. . . . Both the Flesh and the Spirit are apocalyptic powers that do things not only in but also to the Galatians (:, , –a, –a).’ The ‘Flesh’ continues to exist even after the advent of Christ and threatens the Christian communities. The antidote to it is not something that the Galatians can do themselves, and therefore does not lie in the Galatians’ taking up the Law. The solution lies, rather, ‘in something God has already done. For God has already sent the Spirit into your hearts, calling you into existence as his church. Continue to lead your communal life guided by the Spirit, then, and I can promise you that you will not end up carrying out the Impulsive Desire of the Flesh (paraphrase of :)’ (Martyn : –). Dunn, by contrast, follows a broadly Reformation reading, taking ‘flesh’ to mean ‘the human condition in its belongingness to this world – that is,

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the weakness of the human being in contrast to the power of the divine, the dependency of the creature on the satisfaction of bodily appetites, and the tendency of the physical body to decay and corruption’ (Dunn : ). Martyn’s reading shows some of the dilemmas of such attempts to read Paul against the religio-historical background of his times. Sensitive readings, like Martyn’s, recognize that Paul is not simply taking over apocalyptic or dualist senses of flesh and spirit and using them in a standard way: he is adapting and modifying linguistic usage of his opponents. Part of this modification is to read the text as addressing conflict within the congregation and so to see Paul speaking about flesh and spirit as external forces affecting groups of people. But what kind of forces, and how external? Is Paul using such mythological language metaphorically or literally? The more he uses it in a non-standard way, the more, it follows, he departs from its plain meaning. Both Martyn and his friend Käsemann moved away from Bultmann’s existential interpretation of mythological language, claiming that Paul was interested not only in exploring human selfunderstanding (anthropology) but also in cosmology. This is persuasive, but leaves open the question how far Paul, in attempting to spell out his understanding of the world and history, was forced to draw on ideas and narratives which had been forged to express different ideas, and was therefore obliged to rework them, attenuating their literal sense. The more one accepts that Paul’s attempts at articulating a cosmology are exploratory in this sense, the closer one’s understanding comes to that of someone like Bultmann.

Galatians  New Creation: Life Beyond the Law Overview Paul ends his letter with a rhetorical flourish, written in his own, clumsy hand. Once more he turns on those who are trying to persuade the Galatians to be circumcised. They are acting out of their own interests, seeking to avoid persecution, glorying in the Galatians’ flesh, a none too subtle pun. By contrast he, Paul, glories, boasts only in the cross of Christ, which sets him apart from all worldly vanities: the whole issue over whether to be circumcised or not is part of a world which is passing: what matters is the new creation which is being brought about through the cross. Paul bears the marks on his body of his engagement in the beginnings of the new creation.

Galatians Through the Centuries, First Edition. John Riches. © 2013 John Riches. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Concluding Ethical Advice: Galatians :–

Precisely because of the fairly unsystematic nature of this section, commentators tend to focus on a quite wide variety of motifs. I shall focus on how they have taken the phrase ‘fulfilling the law of Christ’.

The patristic period Marcion has already commented that : indicates that the Law has been fulfilled (adimpleta) and is (therefore) not to be fulfilled (adimplenda). Tertullian himself is at pains to point out that Marcion can hardly mean that, because the Law is no longer to be fulfilled, we must therefore no longer love our neighbour as ourselves (Tertullian, Marc. .; ANF .). Chrysostom takes up the theme of the believers’ fulfilling of the law and offers an interesting reading of the Greek anapleroun which can mean either ‘fulfil’, e.g. a contract or duty, or ‘fill a gap, replace, make up for’. Chrysostom, unusually, takes it in the latter sense and suggests that it means that the Christians are together, in common, to make up their several deficiencies: ‘So do ye by reaching forth a hand one to another when about to fall, fulfil the Law in common, each completing what is wanting in his neighbour by his own endurance’ (NPNF .). Augustine, reflecting on :, states that those who reprove should do so with the intention not of humiliating but of instructing. The important thing is that any such action should be undertaken out of love: ‘Love, and say what you like; in no way will what sounds like an insult really be an insult if you clearly keep in mind that your intention in using the sword of God’s word is to liberate the person from the siege of vices’ (Augustine : ). Plumer comments: ‘This is the earliest form of the Augustinian maxim that attained such notoriety later when it was used (in the form “Love, and do what you like” (Dilige, et quod vis fac)) to justify the coercion of the Donatists. For the later version see e.g. ep. Io. tr... (PL :)’ (Augustine : , n. ). Christians ‘fulfil the law of love by bearing one another’s burdens.’ While the Manichaeans denied that the duty of loving God and neighbour was contained in the Old Testament (NPNF ., mor. ..; Augustine : , n. ), Augustine stresses the unity of the Law in the two testaments. ‘The same Scripture and the same commandment, then, is called the Old Testament when it weighs down slaves panting for earthly goods, and the New Testament when it lifts up free people ardent for eternal goods’ (Augustine : ).

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Thomas Aquinas For Aquinas, charity is specifically linked with ‘the law of Christ’ for three reasons. First, it is what distinguishes the old from the new Law, ‘for the former is a law of fear, but the latter of love’. Second, Christ ‘promulgated His law in terms of charity’ (Jn :–). Third, Christ ‘fulfilled it and left us an example of how to fulfil it; for he bore our sins out of charity: “Surely he hath borne our infirmities” (Is. :) . . . Thus, then, ought we to carry one another’s burdens out of charity, that so we may fulfil the law of Christ’ (Aquinas : ; : ). There is much of Augustine here, but the emphasis on the fact that it is the same commandment which is fulfilled is absent.

Luther For Luther, the Augustinian contrast between the Old Testament Law and the law of Christ is now to be drawn in such a way as to make them mutually exclusive. ‘The law of Christ is the law of love. Christ, after he had redeemed us, renewed us and made us his Church, gave us no other law but the law of mutual love’ (Luther : ; LW .). This is not just a matter of wishing one another well, but of bearing those ‘things which be grievous unto thee, and which thou wouldst not willingly bear. Therefore Christians must have strong shoulders and mighty bones, that they may bear flesh, that is, the weakness of their brethren.’ But while this means that they must bear the vices which occur in every state of life, it does not mean extending such tolerance to ‘them which deny Christ, and not only do not acknowledge their sin, but also defend it; neither doth it belong unto those which continue still in their sins (who do also partly deny Christ)’ (Luther : ; LW .–).

Calvin Calvin follows Luther in taking the burdens of v.  to refer to the ‘weakness and vices under which we labour’. Thus we are enjoined ‘not to indulge or overlook the evils by which our brethren are pressed down, but rather to disburden them’. It is in this way that Christians will ‘fulfil the law of Christ’, which is implicitly contrasted with the Law of Moses, ‘as if he said, “If you desire to keep a law, Christ enjoins on you a law which you can only prefer to all others; and that is, to cherish kindness towards each other . . .” By this he means that everything that is foreign to love is unnecessary’, taking the Greek to mean ‘absolute completion’ (Calvin : –, contra Chrysostom above).

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Cudworth Here we first encounter Perkins’s editor, Ralph Cudworth, who throws himself into his work with extraordinary zeal ( pages out of ). Like Luther and Calvin, Cudworth takes burdens to refer to vices, but he also lists other afflictions which Christians have to bear, including ‘outward frailties, in the actions of men’s lives, (which are not felt oftentimes of those that are subject unto them, but heavie burdens to others with whom they converse) as curiousnesse, nicenesse, slownesse, selfe conceitednesse, frowardnesse, hastinesse, and such like’ (Perkins : ). Perhaps rather more surprisingly, in view of Perkins’s determined attempts in the rest of the commentary to show the continuities between the law of the Old and New Testaments is Cudworth’s reading of the phrase ‘fulfilling the law of Christ’. In what sense, he asks, is it a new law? It is so partly because he renewed it, freeing it from the ‘false glosses and interpretations’ of the scribes and Pharisees, ‘fulfilling it most perfectly’. And because ‘he abrogating the ceremoniall Law, and many judicials, onely renued this precept of the morall law, in commanding it as his law to the Church. Joh. . This is my commandment, that ye love one another, as if he should say, Though I have abrogated the ceremoniall law, and antiquated the judiciall, yet this commandement shall never be abrogated’ (Perkins : ).

Hilgenfeld For Hilgenfeld, the same patient love which is to be shown to those who falter, is to be shown in bearing what is ‘irritating and troublesome’ in others, a commandment which is indeed sufficiently taxing and demanding to be reckoned as a proper discharge of the requirement to fulfil the law of Christ. For this can consist only in love ‘which proves itself in the regular patterns of spiritual life’ (Hilgenfeld : ). This forms a fitting (so Hilgenfeld) climax to the injunctions relating to the communal life of Christians. But while Paul offers this general injunction, he does not lay down specific rules. This corresponds to his own practice, where he could both pride himself on his own independence ( Cor :;  Cor :f) and also accept voluntary contributions from his congregations ( Cor :; Phil :; Hilgenfeld : ).

Lightfoot Lightfoot restricts his comments on the ‘fulfilling of the law’ to some linguistic and textual observations on anaplerōsēte, which he translates ‘ye will rigorously

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fulfil’. The past tense, as opposed to the aorist infinitive reading marks the completeness of the act, and thus adds force to the preposition: ‘fulfil the law then and there.’ The phrase ‘of Christ’ indicates ‘the law not of Moses but of Christ’ (Lightfoot : ). While he does not dwell on the theological implications of his analysis, there is little doubt about its direction.

Recent historical scholarship More recent scholars have pointed to the difficulty of accounting for Paul’s expression ‘fulfilling the law of Christ’. As Barclay explains, a number of interpretations of the phrase have been offered: () that it refers to a rabbinic view that the Messiah would reinterpret or re-promulgate the Law (a view held by W.D. Davies, but with little support in the Jewish literature, as he acknowledged); () Paul thought that Jesus had reinterpreted the Law, and that this was the new ethical teaching for the church (a view supported by W.D. Davies and C.H. Dodd, but there is too little agreement about how much Paul know of the tradition of Jesus’s sayings); () Paul was taking over a term used by his opponents (Betz : –), but this might be conceding too much to them, particularly at the end of the letter; () Paul by ‘law’ here means not the Torah but ‘norm’ or ‘principle’, so referring to the principle which governs Christian life (Barclay : –). Clearly there are links between this verse and :, which speaks of the whole Law being fulfilled in one word, the command in Lev : to love one’s neighbour. It would then be possible, in the light of Jesus’s summary of the Law, to read : as meaning that those who fulfil the law through love fulfil the Law as taught by Christ. More likely, perhaps, would be that Paul intends it to be read in the light of his own comments about love and Christ in relation to Christ’s death, as the supreme example of his love. In this way, to fulfil the law of Christ would be to follow the example of Christ’s loving. This would be not so much a matter of obeying a new code promulgated by the Messiah but of following his example as that which redefines the Law. There is no denying that there is a considerable element of ambiguity in the phrase, and this is added to by Paul’s use of ‘fulfill’ (as opposed, e.g., to ‘doing’). ‘“Fulfillment” conveys a stronger impression of satisfying the law’s demands without the exactitude implicit in such terms as “doing” or “keeping” the law’ (Barclay : ). This leaves the matter nicely open, which may be the way Paul wanted it.

Galatians 

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

A New Creation: Galatians :–

The passage contains a number of puzzles and ambiguities. What is it for Paul to speak about a kainē ktisis (new creation/new creature?)? Does this, as Marcion and the Gnostics would argue, imply that there are two gods at work in this story? Or is it more a question of God intervening to renew a creation which has been corrupted by his creatures? When Paul speaks of kainē ktisis, is he referring to the replacement/renewal of the whole created world? Or to the renewal (achieved or anticipated) of some or all creatures; or to a new principle by which people may walk? When Paul speaks of being crucified to the world and the world to him, what are we to make of this double metaphor? What does ‘world’ refer to: the ways of ‘the world’, the material, created world, the old order? What is meant by crucifixion? What significance does Paul attach to the cross and to his ‘crucifixion’? Does the pairing ‘circumcision and uncircumcision’ refer to old rules, to ethnic groups, to the order of things? Or is it a metaphorical way of referring to the distinction between what is external and internal?

Dualist readings It is not difficult to see how this section of the letter would have appealed to Marcion and Gnostics whose views are represented in The Gospel of Philip. The law of the creator God is set aside, as is his world: what matters is the new world brought about by Christ. The notion of the new creation is reflected in The Gospel of Philip: ‘[s]ince Christ came, the world has been created, cities have been organized and the dead have been buried’ (Gosp. Phil. ). ‘Before the anointed came there was no bread in the world: just as paradise, where Adam was, had many trees for the food of animals but did not have wheat for the food of human beings, and human beings were nourished like animals. But when the anointed, the perfect human being, came, he brought bread from heaven so that human beings might be fed with the food of the human being’ (Gosp. Phil. ). Tertullian replies to Marcion that it is the world which is set aside, not the creator God himself. ‘The world, in the apostle’s sense, here means life and conversation according to worldly principles; it is in renouncing these that we and they are mutually crucified and mutually slain’ (Marc. :; ANF .). But the challenge will remain: the notion of a new creation quickly shades over into that of a new creator.

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Plate  Valentin de Bourgogne, Paul Writing his Epistles. Bourgogne’s picture, painted around , shows Paul as a literary figure composing his letters with the aid of printed books, rather than as someone whose world is shaped by oral communication, who dictated his letters to a scribe and made only occasional written contributions of his own (Gal :). Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, Houston.

Chrysostom Chrysostom echoes Tertullian in his insistence that the world to which Paul has been crucified is ‘not the heaven nor the earth, but the affairs of life, the praise of men, retinues, wealth, and all such things as have a show of splendour’. All this is dead to Paul, and he to it. This double crucifixion is important for Chrysostom: ‘neither can they captivate and overcome me, for they are dead once for all, nor can I desire them, for I too am dead to them. Nothing can be more blessed than this putting to death, for it is the foundation of the blessed life.’ Thus he identifies the new creature with the rule of life which Paul enjoins them to follow. The cross has persuaded Paul, who once persecuted people on behalf of circumcision, to leave it behind on a level with uncircumcision and ‘to seek for things strange and marvellous and above the heavens’. This new rule is a new creature, because it refers to the recreation of our soul, grown old with sin, in the waters of baptism. And because it refers to ‘things to come, because both the heaven

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and the earth, and all the creation, shall with our bodies be translated into incorruption’. They should not be concerned with circumcision, which is useless (what will a circumcised body look like ‘when all things have undergone such a change’?!), ‘but seek the new things of grace’ (NPNF .–). One does not have to go to Mount Athos, or indeed to read Dostoevsky, to realize how enormously influential this kind of ascetic, mystagogic reading of Paul has been.

Augustine By contrast, Augustine’s account is relatively flat, though it has considerable similarities. Crucifixion is also read in terms of not desiring anything from the world. He takes Paul’s expression of indifference about circumcision as a further reference to Paul’s circumcision of Timothy, and takes the new ‘creature’ (Latin creatura) to refer to the new life in faith in Jesus Christ. It is not easy, he comments, to ‘find examples of the term creation being applied to people who have attained adoptive sonship by believing’, though he recognizes this use in  Cor :– and again in Rom :, where not only creation but also those who have the first-fruits of the Spirit will be set free from bondage to decay. But even there, says Augustine, Paul ‘distinguishes believers from “creation”, just as he sometimes calls the same people “human beings”, sometimes not’. There is clearly a note of reserve here: the new rule of life prepares people for the vision of God and distinguishes believers from those who ‘because of their carnal blindness refuse to see the Lord, whose grace they spurn in their desire to be time-servers’ (Augustine : –). There is a reluctance on Augustine’s part to accept that such transformation and new life is already a present reality: the emphasis is more on preparation for the future. One can sense the anxiety that such thoughts would bring him too close to the dualism from which he had only recently freed himself.

Thomas Aquinas It is interesting to see a very similar pattern of reading turned by Aquinas into something altogether more confident and sunny. ‘Each person glories in that through which he is considered great.’ Paul considers himself great in nothing but Christ, and consequently glories in the cross of Christ, ‘because in it are found all the things about which men usually glory’. It is a sign of God’s (as opposed to men’s) friendship (Rom :) which he enjoys; of the more excellent knowledge which he enjoys in the cross ( Cor :) and of freedom from sin (Rom :). Through the cross we are accepted into the fellowship of the

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heavenly ranks and share in Christ’s triumph over the demons (Col :). Thus for Paul all the worldly equivalents of such goods no longer have any power: they have been crucified to him, just as he is considered as dead, as he carries the marks of worldly shame, of the cross. What is interesting in this reading, which formally is very similar both to Chrysostom’s and to Augustine’s is that this is not about the deadening of desire per se but rather about the education of desire. Paul takes delight and pride in all the new goods which make him great; but they are all goods which accrue to him as a result of his being crucified to the world and the desire for its goods and seeking all good from the cross of Christ. Why does he do this? ‘Indeed he glories mainly in that which avails and helps in joining him to Christ; for it is this which the apostle desires, namely, to be with Christ. And because the Jewish rite and the observances of the Gentiles are of no avail in this regard, but only the Cross of Christ, therefore he glories in it alone.’ Nothing will do but a new creature. Taking his cue from :, ‘For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth anything nor uncircumcision; but faith that worketh by charity’, he too, like Augustine, identifies the creature with faith informed by charity. ‘In this way, then, by a new creature, i.e. by the faith of Christ and the charity of God which has been poured into our hearts, we are made and are joined to Christ’ (Aquinas : –; : –). The shift from Augustine to Aquinas is subtle but crucial: for Augustine faith is that which prepares us for the vision of God; for Aquinas, while the new creature is first identified as faith working through love, there is a significant shift to seeing the new creature not so much as a rule or principle to be followed but rather as a new mode of existence, a life in union with Christ, such that those who enjoy it are themselves made new: ‘it [the new creature, faith working through love] is called “new” because by it we are reborn into a new life by the Holy Spirit.’ Nevertheless, despite these shifts in mood and emphasis, what these three readings all have in common is that the kainē ktisis of Paul’s text is firmly identified with a new creature introduced into God’s world, which brings about a more or less radical transformation of those who embrace it, and not with a new cosmos, a new form of paradise established to replace the present world. It operates at the level of individual transformation.

Luther The change of mood and theological perspective when we reach Luther is palpable. The Christian believer – and the movement between the believer in Luther’s day and Paul is constant – is one who glories not in the things of the world but in ‘tribulation, reproaches, infirmities, &c’. The world which is the source of such persecutions is no longer the world outside the church with

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its search for wealth and knowledge and position as in Augustine and Aquinas, but rather ‘the Pope and the whole world’ which ‘most cruelly persecute us, condemn us, and kill us, because we suffer these things, not for our evil deeds, as thieves, murderers, &c., but for Christ’s sake, our Lord and Saviour, whose Gospel we truly preach’ (Luther : ; LW .). Having redefined the world to include the papacy and the traditional church, Luther proceeds to apply to it Paul’s saying about its crucifixion. Crucifixion here means condemnation, damnation: ‘Thus we crucify and condemn one another. . . . We curse and condemn all man’s traditions concerning mass, orders, vows, willworshippings (cultibus), works, and all the abominations of the Pope and [other] heretics, as the dirt of the devil. They again do persecute and kill us as destroyers of religion and troublers of the public peace.’ Moreover, Luther explicitly includes in this rejection of human traditions precisely the ascetic tradition, which, as we saw with Chrysostom, laid claim to this verse as its own justification: The monks dreamed that the world was crucified to them, when they entered into their monasteries: but by this means Christ is crucified and not the world, yea the world is delivered from crucifying, and is the more quickened by that opinion of holiness and trust in their own righteousness which they had who entered into religion. Thus the faithful judge that to be wisdom, righteousness, and power of God, which the world condemneth as the greatest folly, wickedness and weakness. And contrariwise, that which the world judgeth to be the highest religion and service of God, the faithful do know to be nothing else but execrable and horrible blasphemy against God. (Luther : ; LW .–)

It is this total reversal of values, the proclamation of that which was directly contrary to the truth as true religion, which leads Luther to identify the papacy as Satanic. Against this background, Luther turns to Paul’s dictum about circumcision and uncircumcision. The strategy is clear enough: circumcision is identified with church traditions ‘as touching the eating of flesh, the single life, holy days, and such other. And they curse us, which teach that in Christ Jesu these things do nothing avail’, which is to say that they contribute nothing to justification by faith. Uncircumcision is identified with the followers of the Radical Reformation who Luther describes as ‘those of our own people, who being no less blind than the Papists, do think that liberty from the Pope’s traditions to be a thing so necessary, that unless they by and by break and abolish them all, they are afraid that they sin’. None of this contributes anything to our justification: it may have its place in regulating the life of society or the church, but it contributes nothing to the new life which Christ brings. For that, what is needed is a ‘new creature, whereby the image of God is renewed’. This is again an interesting move:

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whereas Aquinas had linked the ‘new creature’ with ‘faith working through love’ in :, Luther (because of the scholastic use of this verse?) takes this to refer to the transformed believer. What is required is not what we can achieve by our own efforts, but what is created by Christ after the image of God in righteousness and true holiness. . . . Therefore a new creature is the work of the Holy Ghost, which cleanseth our heart by faith, and worketh the fear of God, love, chastity, and other [Christian virtues], and giveth power to bridle the flesh and to reject the righteousness and wisdom of the world. Here is no colouring or new outward shew, but a thing done indeed. Here is created another sense and another judgement, that is to say altogether spiritual, which abhorreth those things that before it greatly esteemed. The monkish life and order did so bewitch us in time past, that we thought there was no other way to salvation.

But now there is a sea-change: These changes consist not in words, but are new operations of the flesh, so that the eyes, ears, mouth, and tongue do not only see, hear and speak otherwise than they did before, but the mind also approveth, [loveth] and followeth another thing than it did before. For before, being blinded with popish errors and darkness, it imagined God to be a merchant, who would sell unto us his grace for our works and merits. But now, in the light of the Gospel, it assureth us that we are counted righteous by faith only in Christ. Therefore it now rejected all willworks, and accomplisheth the works of charity and of our vocation commanded by God. It praiseth and magnifieth God, it rejoiceth and glorieth in the only trust and confidence of God’s mercy through Jesus Christ. If it must suffer any trouble or affliction, it endureth the same cheerfully and gladly, although the flesh repine and grudge thereat. This Paul calleth a new creature. (Luther : ; LW .)

It is hard to imagine a more unequivocally ‘real’ view of justification (imparted as opposed to imputed) than this, Luther’s final statement of the doctrine in his great Galatians commentary.

Calvin To move to Calvin’s commentary is to enter an altogether more calm and reflective world. To glory in the cross is not to rejoice in one’s persecution but to contemplate the strange glory of God revealed in a ‘death full of disgrace and ignominy which God Himself has cursed; a death which men view with abhorrence and shame; in that death he says he will glory, because in it he has perfect

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happiness’. But why the cross, and not the resurrection? ‘[I]n the cross is contained the whole of redemption and all its parts, but the resurrection of Christ does not lead us away from the cross. And note well that he abominates every other sort of glorying as nothing less than a terrible offence.’ In context this seems directed to a theology which seeks to separate the glory and power of God from the work of Christ on the cross, a theology of glory. For it is through the cross that ‘we die to the world’, that is to say, that we die to the ‘old man’, which is opposed to ‘the spiritual Kingdom of Christ’. Calvin shows little taste for Luther’s more polemical reading of the passage: ‘Some expound it thus: “If the world regards me as accursed and outcast, I consider the world to be condemned and accursed.” This seems to me to be a little foreign to Paul’s meaning, but I leave others to judge’ (Calvin : ). Like Luther, Calvin takes Paul’s language of kainē ktisis to refer to the new life of the believer in Christ. But there is an element of conditionality in his reading. The reason why he is crucified to the world and the world to him is that, in Christ, in whom he is engrafted, only a new creature is of any avail. Everything else must be discarded, must perish. I am referring to those things which hinder the renewing by the Spirit. That is why he says in II Corinthians: ‘If any man is in Christ, let him be a new creature’ (II Cor. .). That is, if any man wishes to be considered as within the kingdom of Christ let him be reformed by the Spirit of God; let him not live any longer to himself or to the world, but let him be raised up to a new life. (Calvin : –)

Calvin’s repetition of the phrase ‘let him be’ turns Luther’s affirmation of the change that is effected in those who believe into something which can be realized only by allowing the action of the Spirit in their lives: let them be reformed by the Spirit of God, or indeed by their own action (let them not live any longer to themselves). Interestingly, the text on which he bases this series of exhortations, is elliptical: the ‘let him be’ has to be supplied and could equally well be supplied with a simple declaration: ‘behold a new creature’, ‘he is a new creature’ (RSV). Calvin discusses the point in his commentary on  Corinthians. But here he adds a further qualification: ‘If any one wishes to be considered as within the Kingdom of Christ’, which conjures up a view of justification as – at best – imputed. Interestingly, in the French version of Calvin’s Galatians commentary, he has simply ‘Si aucun veut estre du regne de Christ’ (Calvin : ). It is fascinating to see how the two great Reformers themselves vacillated over this central point of Reformation doctrine. Certainly Calvin’s final summary of the letter’s message is more cautious, and suggests the kind of concerns that we have seen more explicitly stated by Perkins about the lukewarmness of Reformed believers.

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Cudworth Much of Calvin’s reading is reflected in Cudworth’s account, which, in keeping with Perkins’s work in the rest of the book, has a strongly practical, instructional emphasis. There is an almost phenomenological analysis of ‘glorying’: () to rejoice in any good thing; () to reveal this exaltation in speech or deed; () to seek approval for this good, something which can be either good or evil. Vainglorying is boasting of those things that you don’t actually possess or which you possess not of your own efforts; doing so to those whose judgement is erroneous; and not ‘referring it to the maine and proper end, the glory of God, and the good of his Church’ (Perkins : ). For Paul the only true boasting is in the cross of Christ, ‘the all-sufficient, expiatorie, and satisfactorie sacrifice of Christ upon the crosse, with the whole worke of our redemption: in the saving knowledge whereof he professeth he will glorie, and boast’. For ‘Christ crucified is the treasurie, and storehouse of the Church: seeing that in him are hid, not only the treasures of wisdome and knowledge, Coloss. .. But of bountie and grace, John .. And of all spirituall blessings, Ephes. .’ (Perkins : –). In outline, the interpretation is very similar to that of Aquinas, though with greater stress on the redemptive work of Christ. Nor are there many surprises in his reading of ‘the world is crucified to me and I to the world’. The world is not ‘the frame of heaven and earth, nor the creatures, nor mankind: but honour, riches, pleasure, favour, wisedome, glorie, and whatsoever is opposed to the kingedome of Christ, and the new creature’. He follows Luther, rather than Calvin, in understanding crucifixion to mean condemnation. Such condemnation stems from the death of Christ, but in different ways. ‘We are crucified to the world, properly by the spirit of Christ, weaning our affections from the love of this world. The world is crucified to us, by the death of Christ, improperly, and by accident, in that we are made such as the world cannot but hate and persecute: for seeing we are made new creatures, and chosen out of the world, therefore the world hateth us, John ..’ But the fundamental opposition for Cudworth is less the papacy, as with Luther, but more the ‘honours, pleasures, profits, and preferments of the world’. Those who are crucified with Christ have ‘crucified the flesh, with the affections and lusts’ (Gal :; Perkins : –). This opposition, in a turn which again owes as much to Luther as to Calvin, is construed in terms of the outward and the inward, which is the schema through which he reads Paul’s contrast between circumcision and uncircumcision, on the one hand, and the new creature, on the other. The ‘wealth, wisdome, strength, Lawes, pollicy, and whatever is of high account, and glorious in the eies of the world’ is contrasted with regeneration. Outward callings, actions, of fasting, alms and prayer, even the ‘outward element of baptisme, without the inward

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grace’, are of ‘no force’, no more than is the physical eating of the elements of the eucharist. For the things that count with God are not outward, but ‘spirituall and eternall, not temporall and carnall . . . Which as they shall utterly cease in the kingdome of glory, Matth. ., so they are not of any moment or account in the kingdome of grace’ (Perkins : ). However, if this might sound as if distinctions of rank and social difference were all to be discarded in the new world of Puritan England, Cudworth is quick to move to counter such views. He does so by engaging with Catholic views on the matter. They argue that ‘these privileges and outward things, as Prince, and people; Master, and servant: bond, and free, &c. have place in the kingdome of grace, seeing Christianity doth not abolish nature, nor civill pollicy’. He, Cudworth, wishes to ‘consider man in two waies, in respect of the outward, or inward man’. Outwardly, there are differences of status and gender which are the subject of the apostle’s exhortation. But in respect of someone’s spiritual estate, ‘as he is a member of the invisible, or Catholique Church, under spiritual government, consisting in righteousness, peace of conscience and joy in the holy Ghost, Rom ., there is no distinction of calling, condition, or sexe; for we are all one in Christ. Gal...’ Thus he can uphold existing social order, as not pertaining to the kingdom of grace; reject Catholic privileging of certain callings – celibacy, monasticism, vegetarianism – for the same reason; and also attack Anabaptist rejection of social distinctions in the church, accusing them of ‘bringing in an anarchie, that is, an ataxy into Christian society; by taking away Christian magistrates, and distinction between master and servant: for by the same reason we may confound the sexe of man and woman’ (Perkins : ). It follows that if such a radical restructuring of society is not what is understood by a ‘new creature’, then it must relate exclusively to the inner man. ‘By the new creature the Apostle understandeth the image of God, or renovation of the whole man, both in the spirits of our minds, and in the affections of our hearts, which is also called the new man.’ The new man is the restoring of the defects of the old man: want of knowledge in the mind, want of subjection in the will, and want of holiness in the affections. There follows an intriguing account of the corruption of the old man. The soul is composed of three elements: its substance, its faculties or powers, the qualities of these faculties. Only the qualities of the faculties are affected by the Fall. The soul is like an instrument out of tune: ‘the fault is not in the substance of the instrument, nor in the sound, but in the disproportion, or jarre in the sound.’ It is the qualities of the soul which are renewed by grace. That is to say, the qualities of the understanding, will and affections are renewed in knowledge, righteousness and holiness. ‘These three making a perfect harmonie in all the faculties of the soule: Holinesse performing all the duties of pietie: righteousnes the duties of humanitie: truth seasoning both the former with sinceritie.’ Before such restoration, men and women are

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dead in sin: those who live in the faith are new creatures, and therefore the old way, the way of Popish religion is superseded. ‘So our religion is the restored or reformed doctrine first taught by the Apostles, which afterward was corrupted by men’s devices. Albeit, in Tertullian’s sense [quod antiquissimum, id verissimum], ours is the old, and theirs the new: as the image of God is the old man, and corruption the new.’ This all suggests a very positive assessment of Christian perfection, whereby God renews the qualities of the faculties of the soul, and this work is to be ascribed to God alone, not to any co-operation on our part. But the application is full of anxiety: ‘If we be not changed in our lives, but remain old Adams still . . . in minding, willing, affecting earthly things; we are no new creatures, though we promise and protest never so much: we are but hypocrites, deceiving others, and our selves also’ (Perkins : –). All this contributes to the particular character of Puritan spirituality: its high sense of human potential with the possibility of radical transformation by God’s sovereign grace and the deep anxiety which this causes when evidence of human failing persists.

Hilgenfeld and Lightfoot Hilgenfeld and Lightfoot offer terse but compressed interpretations of these verses. For Hilgenfeld it is the ‘universal, absolute significance of the redemptive death of his Lord which sets aside (aufheben) Paul’s previous relationship to the world in its totality, in Idealist terms, “the sum of all worldly relations”. It is this consciousness of spiritual transcendence of the whole complex of worldly relations, which leads him again to declare the complete valuelessness of circumcision and uncircumcision in the new creation of Christ. Those who share this cast of mind and live according to this guide are the only true Israel and people of God’ (Hilgenfeld : ). That is to say, the new God-consciousness which stems from Paul’s understanding of Jesus’s redemptive death marks a decisive turn in the history of the human spirit, allowing it to leave behind the old world of particular attachments and allegiances and to enter a world of universal relationships. Lightfoot remains largely in the Reformation tradition: the kosmos, ‘the material universe, is the sphere of external ordinances’. He links the phrase kainē ktisis with the Hebrew expression beriah hodeshah, ‘a common expression in Jewish writers of one brought to the knowledge of the true God’. It is spiritual enlightenment which creates anew, and he links this with the notion of regeneration. All those who follow this rule will become part of the Israel of God, the ‘spiritual Israel generally, the whole body of believers whether Jew or Gentile’ (: –).

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Twentieth-century readings and the influence of apocalyptic In light of the discovery of apocalyptic eschatology, these verses acquire a more cosmic dimension. Schweitzer who was an early proponent of such readings writes simply: ‘The Pauline assertion that he who is in Christ is a new creature (kainē ktisis, Gal. vi.,  Cor. V. ) has nothing to do with the notion of rebirth. He who has his being in Christ is a new creature because, inasmuch as he has died and risen again in Christ, he belongs already in the new world’ (Schweitzer : ). Such views were largely resisted by Bultmann, who reads the language of ‘new creation’ as speaking of a new, eschatological existence, based in a new self-understanding which manifests itself in love. Placing the parallel statements of I Cor :; Gal : and : side by side makes clear the nature of ‘love’: for the man of faith the characteristics ‘circumcision’ and ‘uncircumcision,’ which once determined a man’s classification, have sunk into insignificance; all that now matters is ‘keeping the commandments of God’ (I Cor. :) – or in the second case, ‘faith working through love’ – or, in the third case, ‘a new creation’. That is, God’s demand is for love; it becomes real as the manifestation of faith in living, and it is just in this that eschatological existence becomes reality; this existence, moreover – the ‘new creation’ – is to be found only ‘in Christ’ (II Cor. :). Love is also designated an eschatological phenomenon by the fact that it is the primary fruit of the Spirit (Gal. :). . . . It can be called nothing less because in it the possibility opened up by ‘faith’ and ‘hope’ becomes reality in concrete existence.’ (Bultmann : –)

This kind of reading of cosmological language as anthropology was strongly attacked by Bultmann’s pupil Käsemann. He argued that Paul was never concerned with anthropology in isolation from his wider concern with Christ’s redemption of the world. ‘Man for Paul is never simply himself. Just as he is always a concrete part of this world, so too, he becomes what he is through external influences, specifically, through the power which seizes hold of him, and the ruling forces to which he gives himself up’ (Käsemann : –). This concern with the cosmological dimension of Paul’s theology has proved a continuing theme in the work of J. Louis Martyn (a; b). As Martyn points out (Martyn a: ), Galatians represented something of an embarrassment for Käsemann, insofar as it contained no reference to the ‘expectation of an imminent Parousia’, which was how Käsemann had defined apocalyptic. What other indications might there then be of the apocalyptic character of Paul’s thought to be found in this letter? Martyn takes as his starting point Paul’s concluding paragraph in Galatians, in which he starts by apparently contrasting himself and his opponents and offering the Galatians ‘a choice between two mystagogues’. But rather than continue along such a line, Paul speaks, not of ‘two

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alternatives, between which the Galatians might make a choice. He speaks rather of two different worlds’ (Gal :b–). ‘He speaks of an old world, from which he has been painfully separated, by Christ’s death, by the death of that world, and by his own death. And he speaks of a new world, which he grasps under the arresting expression, new creation’ (Martyn a: ). What, for Martyn, is striking about the way in which Paul refers to these two worlds, the old and the new, is the fact that in the old world are included not just circumcision but also uncircumcision. The old, that is to say, is described in terms of pairs of opposites, what he calls ‘antinomies’, which as it were provided the constitutive elements of that world, a way of thought widely to be found in the ancient world. To declare that such a pair of opposites was no longer of any significance is to say that the whole world which was founded on it has died. Such a view is further supported by Gal :, where the polar opposites of Jew/Greek, slave/free and male/female are also said to have no further force for those who are baptized into Christ, for they are all one in Christ. Other antinomies evidenced in Galatians include: to sin/to observe the Law, to be wrong/to be set right by the Law, to be dead/to be made alive by the Law. In being crucified with Christ, the Galatians all suffered the consequential loss of the world of religious differentiation, the world, that is, that had as one of its fundamental elements the antinomy of the Law/ not-Law. For crucifixion with Christ means the death of the cosmos of religion, the cosmos in which all human beings live. Swept away are the basic guidelines which – in one form or another – all people had formerly considered permanently dependable. (Martyn a: )

The old world has in turn been replaced by a new world, which is characterized not just by the new unity in Christ, as opposed to the former differentiation by polar opposites, but also by new opposites of its own. Key among these is the opposition between the Spirit and the Flesh, a pair of opposites which ‘owes its birth to God’s new-creative act. It is born of the new event, God’s sending both of his Son and the Spirit of his Son into the present evil age (Gal :–; :–)’. This in turn inaugurates a new war between the Flesh and the Spirit which marks out the existence of the new Israel of God. ‘The Spirit and the Flesh constitute an apocalyptic antinomy, in the sense that they are two opposed orbs of power, actively at war with one another since the advent of the Spirit. The territory in which human beings now live is a newly invaded space, and that means that its structures cannot remain unchanged’ (Martyn a: ). Martyn’s reading is rich and original. It moves decisively beyond the categories in which, for most of the history of its reception, Galatians has been read, whether that is in terms of a contrast between the world’s pursuit of (vain)glory and the church’s glorying in the benefits conveyed by the cross of Christ, or between the – individual – ‘old man’, the fallen existence of the sinner,

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and the renewed (transformed?) existence of the believer in Christ. It takes Paul’s cosmological language with a degree of realism which only Marcion and the Gnostics had previously embraced with any enthusiasm. Martyn himself wishes to draw a strong line between his own reading of Paul and Marcion’s. For Paul, as for the Pythagoreans, an antinomy is more than an antithesis, for an antinomy lies at the foundation of the cosmos, whereas in common usage an antithesis is a form of rhetoric, a product of human thought. Moreover, in Paul’s view, as we will see, the antinomies of God’s new creation have their origin in the apocalypse of Christ and of his Spirit. For this reason, they are fundamentally different from Marcion’s ontological antitheses. (a: )

Marcion’s ontological contrast between the creation of the creator God and the new world of the strange God of Jesus Christ, rooted in a radical ontological dualism, is certainly very different in its articulation from Martyn’s account of a radical change in the order of things which has its origin in the cosmic event of the advent of the Son and the Spirit. Yet, for Martyn, the consequences of this cosmic event are that the very foundations of the old world are undone, the old world ‘crucified’. Does this imply that the foundations were laid by someone other than the God of the Son, as Marcion would have urged? Or does it mean that the world at whose foundations lay the Law and the not-Law was merely a temporary measure with a limited purpose, though one which was consistent with the overall plan of the creator-saviour God of Jesus Christ? In the words of a Festschrift for J. Louis Martyn: ‘The Conversation Continues . . .’ .

Glossary Albertus Magnus (c.–), major medieval theologian who wrote commentaries on nearly all books of the Bible. Ambrosiaster, fourth-century author of the oldest Latin commentary on the Pauline epistles. Identity unknown. Anabaptism, sixteenth-century movement, which emphasized adult baptism of the committed believer. Critical of both the Roman church and the mainstream Protestant churches. Sought to live according to the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount. Fiercely persecuted by Catholics and Protestants. Arianism, christological doctrine attributed to Arius, a fourth-century Alexandrian presbyter, that the Son of God was created. Aristotle (– BCE), Greek philosopher on whose theory of knowledge and metaphysics Thomas Aquinas drew heavily. Barth, Karl (–), Swiss Reformed theologian, critical of Liberal theology. Author of multi-volume Church Dogmatics with strong emphasis on the Word of God. Galatians Through the Centuries, First Edition. John Riches. © 2013 John Riches. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Glossary

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Bede (–), Northumbrian monk who wrote Church History of the English People and numerous biblical commentaries. Beza, Theodore (–), Reformed theologian who was Calvin’s successor at Geneva, biblical translator, commentator and textual scholar. Boussett, Wilhelm (–), Professor at Göttingen. One of a group of scholars, who formed the history of religions school. Bucer, Martin (–), originally a Dominican friar, influenced by Luther and active as reformer in Strassburg, Hessen and Bonn. Forced to flee from Strassburg, he taught in Cambridge till his death. Under Mary his bones and books were burnt at the stake. Budé, Guillaume (–), French humanist with interest in the natural sciences, mathematics and philosophy. Sought to breaks ties with scholasticism and came into conflict with the Sorbonne. Librarian at Fontainbleau. Bullinger, Heinrich (–), Friend and successor of Zwingli in Zürich. Responsible for rapprochement between Zürich and Geneva. Important theologian and biblical commentator. Bultmann, Rudolf (–), Professor of New Testament at Marburg. Close to Barth in the early s during which time he also worked closely with Martin Heidegger at Marburg. Offered an ‘existential interpretation’ of New Testament mythology. Bunyan, John (–), preacher and member of an independent congregation in Bedford and author of Pilgrim’s Progress (). Found relief from his sense of guilt and fear of damnation in Luther’s Galatians Commentary. Imprisoned after the Restoration for his beliefs. Cajetan, Thomas (–), Dominican theologian, founder of neo-Thomism. Examined Luther at the Diet of Augsburg, . Cappadocian Fathers: Basil the Great (–), his brother, Gregory of Nyssa (–), and friend, Gregory of Nazianzen (–), were three of the most influential fourth-century Greek-speaking theologians. Cartwright, Thomas (–), who, as Divinity Professor in Cambridge, disputed the New Testament basis of the episcopate (against John Whitgift); a major influence on Congregationalism and Presbyterian Puritanism. Catholic Christianity, used here to refer to the undivided (Great) Church of the first millennium, as distinct to officially designated heretical and schismatic groups, or indeed earlier groups like the Jewish Christian communities who remained outside. Clement of Alexandria, church theologian and Christian humanist of the second century (d. c.) who against the Gnostics propounded his own form of Christian gnosis. Made a collection of the sayings of the Gnostic Theodotus. Diodore, bishop of Tarsus (d. ), taught in Antioch until forced into exile. Founded the Antiochene school of exegesis which was prosecuted by his pupil Theodore of Mopsuestia, one of the first major interpreters of Galatians. Condemned as founder of Nestorianism in . Donatism, North African schism occasioned by the election of two bishops in Carthage, one of whom was accused of tolerating those who had handed over sacred books or vessels during the persecution. A rigorist group which caused Augustine much trouble. Eck, Johann (–), Luther’s main opponent over many years. Taught at Ingolstadt.

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Glossary

Ellicott, Charles John (–), Cambridge New Testament scholar who wrote the first historical critical commentaries on the Pauline epistles. Active in the revision of the King James Version. Erasmus, Desiderius, of Rotterdam (–), Dutch humanist with sympathies for the Reformers, while remaining within the Roman Church. Wrote paraphrases of the books of the New Testament, including Galatians. Eusebius of Emesa (c.–), pupil of Eusebius of Caesarea; important representative of Antiochene school of biblical exegesis. Only fragments of his writings remain. Eznik of Kolb (b. c.), Armenian bishop who worked on translation of the Bible into Armenian. Wrote a tract Against the Sects, which attacks Marcionites. Faber Stapulensis (Lefèvre d’Etaples, –), French humanist theologian who produced critical editions, commentaries and translations of biblical texts. Luther used his edition of the Psalms in his lectures. Remained in the Roman Church. Fortunatus, Manichaean priest in Hippo, whose two-day disputation with Augustine is preserved in full in Contra Fortunatum. Glock, Paul (–), Hutterite Anabaptist from Württemberg, who spent many years in prison, was freed, and subsequently became a minister in Moravia. Glossa Ordinaria, the standard medieval collection of interpretations of each of the biblical texts, drawn from the Fathers. It included Jerome’s preface(s) to each of the books of the Bible and was printed many times from the th to the th centuries. Gnosticism, refers to a wide range of doctrines held by some early Christian groups which see the world as divided into psychics (physical ones) and pneumatics (spiritual ones) and salvation to lie in the acquisition of secret knowledge (gnosis). Gospel of Philip, third-century text from Nag Hammadi which is probably of Valentinian Gnostic origin. Salvation is linked with a symbolic marriage ritual between the Gnostic male and a woman representing his angelic soul. Grynée (Grynaeus), Simon (–), Professor of Greek and Latin at Heidelberg, then, as Erasmus’s successor, in Basel, where he also taught New Testament. Friend of Calvin. Hardy, Thomas (–), English novelist and poet. Harnack, Adolf von (–), enormously productive and distinguished church historian in Berlin; influenced by A. Ritschl, to whose ideas he gave wide prominence. Hegel, G.W.F. (–), German Idealist philosopher, whose understanding of history had great influence on F.C. Baur and A. Hilgenfeld. Heidegger, Martin (–), German existentialist philosopher, who worked with Bultmann in Marburg in the s. His work Being and Time was influential in theological circles. Heitmüller, Wilhelm (–), member of the history of religions school in Göttingen, who subsequently taught in Tübingen. Related Christian sacraments to the world of Hellenistic religion. Helvidius, fourth-century layman in Rome who wrote against monasticism and overemphasis on virginity. Argued that Mary led a normal married life after Jesus’s birth. Attacked by Jerome. Heracleon, second-century Gnostic teacher, offering strikingly different readings of Paul. Hippolytus, early third-century Roman theologian, who wrote biblical commentaries and, like his teacher Irenaeus, attacked the Gnostics.

Glossary

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Hooker, Richard (–), leading Anglican theologian whose Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity set out the theological basis for Anglican church order, rejecting the Calvinist notion that it should be deduced from the Bible. Hort, F.J.A. (–), Professor of New Testament in Cambridge who with B.F. Westcott produced a text-critical edition of the New Testament. Close associate and friend of J.B. Lightfoot. Hutterites, Anabaptist movement which traces its origins back to Jakob Huter (burnt at the stake in ), founder of the Bruderhof. Spread across Europe into Russia, and to North America in . Ibn Rushd (Averroës) (–), who lived in Spain and Morocco; most famous of medieval Islamic philosophers who wrote commentaries on Aristotle and had considerable influence in Christian theological circles. Ibn Sina (Avicenna) (–), Islamic philosopher and physician from Bokhara, interpreter of Aristotle and author of works on science, religion and philosophy. Ignatius of Antioch, bishop of Antioch, martyred in Rome c., wrote seven letters. Lightfoot’s dating of these to the early second century undermined Baur’s late dating of the New Testament writings. Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon (consecrated /), and first major Christian theologian. Developed his salvation-historical theology in reaction to Christian Gnostics (Valentinians), whose views he carefully and accurately documented. Jerome (c.–), scholar from Italy who travelled widely before settling finally in Bethlehem, where he made the first Latin translation of the Bible from the Hebrew and Greek. Biblical commentator and polemicist. Jowett, Benjamin (–), Anglican theologian, classical scholar and philosopher, whose critical views in his commentaries on the Pauline epistles and his contribution to Essays and Reviews () aroused much controversy. Jubilees, Book of, first- or second-century BCE retelling of Gen  to Ex . Formed part of the Qumran library. Kant, Immanuel (–), Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in Königsberg. Sought by his critique of traditional metaphysics to make room for a rational religious faith based on morals. Karlstadt, Andreas Bodenstein (–), colleague of Luther’s at Wittenberg, who at first worked closely with him (in disputation with Eck) but then fell out over questions of eucharist and lay participation. Banished by Luther in . Käsemann, Ernst (–), New Testament professor at Tübingen. Pupil of Bultmann, active in church struggle (finished his doctorate in prison); author of major commentary on Romans. Keble, John (–), hymn-writer, active in the Anglo-Catholic movement in Oxford. Kierkegaard, Søren Aaby (–), Danish philosopher and theologian, who reacted fiercely to the lukewarm character of the offical religion of the Denmark of his time. His thought is worked out through his diaries and various pseudonymous writings. He was an impotant forerunner of European existentialism. Lagrange, M.-J. (–), French Dominican, founder of the École Biblique in Jerusalem, text critic, exegete and founder of the commentary series Études bibliques. Lefèvre d’Etaples, (see Faber Stapulensis). Lessing, G.E. (–), German playwright, critic, philosopher and theologian. While



Glossary

librarian at Wolfenbüttel, published excerpts from Reimarus’s Apology, which sparked a major theological controversy. Libanius (–), Greatest of the fourth-century rhetoricians, teacher of Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory Nazianzen and of Chrysostom. Determined opponent of Christianity. Lietzmann, Hans (–), German New Testament scholar and church historian. Commentary on Galatians in the Handbuch zum Neuen Testament. Maccabean revolt, Jewish rising in  BCE against the Seleucid ruler’s extreme policy of Hellenization and proscription of Jewish observance. Led by Mattathias and his sons Judas and Simon. Maimonides, Moses (–), greatest Jewish philosopher and theologian of the Middle Ages. In his Guide to the Perplexed he sought to give a rational account of Jewish faith and show its compatibility with Aristotle. Influenced Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus. Manichaeanism, dualist religion founded by Mani (–) in Persia and Babylonia. Spread thoughout Mediterranean world in fourth century. Augustine was a Manichaean ‘hearer’ before his conversion to Christianity. Marpeck, Pilgram (c.–), Anabaptist civil engineer from the Tirol who left Tirol because of persecution and worked in Strassburg, St Gall and Augsburg. Numerous writings. Melanchthon, Philipp (–), humanist scholar who became Professor of Greek in Wittenberg in . Close friend and colleague of Luther. Systematic theologian of Lutheranism (Loci communes); wrote commentary on Romans. Meletius (d. ), bishop of Antioch, defender of Nicene faith. Meyer, Heinrich August Wilhelm (–), German clergyman who wrote ninevolume commentary on Gospels, Acts and Pauline epistles (–). His work was continued by many of the most distinguished German historical critics. Müntzer, Thomas (c.–), Radical Reformer, influenced by mystical ideas. Led the Thuringian peasants in the Peasants’ Revolt, captured and executed. Niebuhr, Barthold Georg (–), Prussian statesman and historian who wrote a History of Rome, which was exemplary in its critical treatment of sources. Origen (–), leading exegete and theologian. Taught in Alexandria and Caesarea. Commentary on Galatians is lost, but much is preserved in Jerome. Orthodoxy: ‘Orthodox’ and ‘Orthodoxy’ with a capital ‘O’ are used to refer to Eastern Christianity, which has its centre in Constantinople, and to later forms of Lutheran and Calvinist theology, which set out their beliefs in ways which owed much to scholastic theology. References to ‘orthodox’ and ‘orthodoxy’ with a lower case ‘o’ are to mainstream Christian doctrines and communities. Clearly the latter use is less precise than the former. Pelagius, British monk and ascetic who lived for many years in Rome (d. post ). Wrote commentaries on Pauline epistles; believed in the freedom of the will and human ability to fulfil the Law. Peter Lombard (–), theologian and bishop of Paris. Wrote commentaries on Psalms and Pauline epistles. Best known for his Sentences, in which he summarized the received theological views of the time. Plato (– BCE), pupil of Socrates, founded academy in Athens in  BCE where he taught philosophy. Greatly influenced Christian theology of the first millennium.

Glossary

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Pseudo-Clementines, early Christian narrative about the missionary journeys of Peter and his struggles with Simon Magus. Attributed falsely to Clement , emanates from Jewish-Christian, Gnostic circles. Reginald of Piperno, Thomas Aquinas’s amanuensis who recorded his lectures. Reimarus, H.S. (–), Hamburg schoolmaster and rationalist, fragments of whose Apology were published anonymously by Lessing, including a section on the purpose of Jesus and his disciples, a forerunner of nineteenth-century Lives of Jesus. Renan, Ernest (–), French academic historian and Orientalist who wrote a famous Romantic and immanentist Life of Jesus. Ritschl, Albrecht (–), German New Testament historian and dogmatician, who distanced himself from Baur. Main exponent of German liberal theology. Schleiermacher, F.D.E. (–), German evangelical theologian; professor in Berlin who sought to interpret Christian doctrinal tradition in terms of the ‘pious self-consciousness’. Schlier, Heinrich (–), New Testament scholar, pupil of R. Bultmann, who converted to Catholicism and wrote commentaries on Galatians and Ephesians. Scholasticism, the theology of the medieval schools. Schweitzer, Albert (–), theologian, philosopher, medical missionary, organist and Bach scholar. Stressed the importance of apocalyptic forms of thought for the understanding of early Christianity. Schwenkfeld, Kaspar von (–), lay theologian from Silesia whose spiritualizing views of the eucharist were condemned by Luther. Seneca, Lucius Annaeus ( BCE– CE), Roman orator and statesman, philosopher and poet. His thought shows Stoic and Epicurean influences. Simon Magus, first-century Samaritan figure who was known as ‘the great power’, a title which probably has a Gnostic character. His followers posed a threat to the church in the second century. Staupitz, Johann von (–), Augustinian friar, dean of new theological faculty in Wittenberg, appointed Luther his successor as Professor of Biblical Studies. Initially tried to protect Luther against Rome, but became increasingly estranged. Strauss, David Friedrich (–), pupil of F.C. Baur in Tübingen who published his Life of Jesus in , which claimed that the Gospel material about Jesus was largely the product of popular mythological imagination. Translated into English by George Eliot. Tertullian, Quintus Septimus Florens (c.–), lawyer from Carthage, who worked in Rome till his conversion, returned to Carthage and taught theology. Wrote important treatises against heretics (Marcion), but his rigorism and literal belief in the end of the world drove him out of the church. Theodore of Mopsuestia (d. ), leading Antiochene exegete who wrote commentaries on the Pauline epistles. Condemned after his death as Nestorian. Theodotus, second-century Gnostic teacher and reader of Pauline texts. Clement of Alexandria preserved some of his sayings. Trent, Council of, –;  and –. Meeting of (largely Spanish and Italian) bishops to formulate Roman Catholic response to the Reformation. Used as doctrinal basis for the Counter-Reformation (reform within the Roman Church). Tyndale, William (–), English Reformer, follower of Luther, Bible translator, burnt at stake in Amsterdam.

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Glossary

Ubertino of Casale (c.–c.), a leading Franciscan Spiritual from Tuscany, who attacked Popes Boniface and Benedict XI as dual manifestations of the Antichrist. Author of The Tree of the Crucified Life of Jesus. Valentinus, Gnostic teacher, active mid-second century in Rome. Developed an elaborate cosmological system and founded a form of Christianity with its own rituals. Valerianus Magni (–), Capuchin from Milan, worked in Vienna, Poland and Prague. Leader of the Counter-Reformation in Bohemia. Converted the Landgraf of Hessen-Rheinfels, who publicly abjured the Protestant faith in Cologne Cathedral in . Victorinus, Marius (c.–), North African who taught rhetoric at Rome and converted late in life. Wrote Trinitarian treatises and Pauline commentaries. Waldensians, movement (now principally in Italy) with a long history and which originated in Petrus Valdes, a late twelfth-century Lyons merchant who took a vow of poverty, had the Bible translated and became a popular preacher. Watts, Isaac (–), minister of an Independent congregation in London and eminent hymn-writer. Weiss, Johannes (–), New Testament professor in Marburg and Heidelberg. Emphasized the apocalyptic nature of Jesus’s preaching. Wesley, Charles (–), active Methodist preacher and hymn-writer (c., hymns). Converted by Luther’s Galatians Commentary. Wesley, John (–), leader of Methodists; itinerant preacher, said to have preached in nearly every village in England, Ireland and Wales. Westcott, Brooke Foss (–), Professor of New Testament at Cambridge and bishop of Durham. Important text critic and exegete. Wrote commentaries on the Johannine literature. Wrede, William (–), member of the history of religions school. His book on Paul emphasized Paul’s debt to apocalyptic modes of thought. Zwingli, Ulrich (–), Swiss Reformer in Zürich. Symbolic view of the eucharist led to break with Luther.

Works Cited Aland, Barbara () Marcion/Marcioniten. In TRE , pp. –. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Aland, Barbara () Sünde und Erlösung bei Marcion und die Konsequenz für die sog. beiden Götter Marcions. In Marcion und seine kirchengeschichtliche Wirkung. Ed. G. May and K. Greschat, pp. –. Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur, . Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Ambrosiaster () Ambrosiastri qui Dicitur Commentarius in Epistulas Paulinas. CSEL. Vienna: Holder, Pichler, Tempsky. Aquinas, Thomas () Super Epistolam ad Galatas Lectura. In S. Thomae Aquinatis Super Epistolas S. Pauli Lectura. Ed. Raffaele Cai, pp. –. Rome and Turin: Marietti. Aquinas, Thomas () Commentary on Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians. Trans. F.R. Larcher, OP Aquinas Scripture Series. Albany, NY: Magi Books. Augustine () Select Letters. Loeb Classical Library. London: Heinemann. Galatians Through the Centuries, First Edition. John Riches. © 2013 John Riches. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Works Cited

Augustine () Six Traités Anti-Manichéens. Bibliothèque Augustinienne: Oeuvres de Saint Augustine. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer. Augustine () On Christian Teaching. The World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Augustine () Augustine’s Commentary on Galatians: Introduction, Texts, Translation, and Notes. Ed Eric Plumer. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Augustine, John H. () Authority and Interpretation in Perkins’s Commentary on Galatians. In William Perkins, A Commentary on Galatians. pp. xiv–xlvii. New York: The Pilgrim Press. Babcock, William S. () Augustine and the Spirituality of Desire. Augustinian Studies : –. Backus, I. and Chimelli, C. () L’Épitre à Tous Amateurs. In “La Vraie Piété,” Divers Traités de Jean Calvin et Confession de Foi de Guillaume Farel. Ed. I. Backus, pp. –. Geneva. Barclay, J.M.G. () Obeying the Truth: A Study of Paul’s Ethics in Galatians. SNTW. Edinburgh: T & T Clark. Barrett, C.K. () J.B. Lightfoot as Biblical Commentator. Durham University Journal Extra Complimentary Number (The Lightfoot Centenary Lectures, ed. J.D.G. Dunn January): –. Barth, Karl () The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Part One. Church Dogmatics IV/. Edinburgh: T & T Clark. Baur, Ferdinand Christian () Das Christenthum und die christliche Kirche der Drei Ersten Jahrhunderte. Tübingen: L. Fr. Fues. Baur, Ferdinand Christian () Paul, the Apostle of Jesus Christ, His Life and Work, His Epistles and His Doctrine: A Contribution to a Critical History of Primitive Christianity, Volumes  & . London: Williams and Norgate. Baur, Ferdinand Christian () The Church History of the First Three Centuries. London: Williams and Norgate. Berkouwer, G.C. () Man: The Image of God. Studies in Dogmatics. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans. Betz, H.D. () Galatians: A Commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Churches in Galatia. Hermeneia. Philadelphia: Fortress. Blackman, E.C. () Marcion and His Influence. London: SPCK. Böhlig, A () Die Gnosis: Der Manichäismus. Düsseldorf: Artemis & Winkler. Bornkamm, Karin () Luthers Auslegungen des Galaterbriefs von  und . Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Bousset, Wilhelm () Der Brief an die Galater. In Die Schriften des Neuen Testamentes Neu Übersetzt und für die Gegenwart Erklärt, pp. –. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Bousset, Wilhelm () Kyrios Christos. Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon. Boyarin, Daniel () A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Breward, Ian () The Work of William Perkins. The Courtenay Library of Reformation Classics, . Abingdon: The Sutton Courtenay Press. Brown, Peter () Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. London: Faber & Faber. Bultmann, R. () Geschichte der Paulus-Forschung. Theologische Rundschau NF: –.

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zum . Geburtstag. Ed. J. Friedrich, W. Pohlmann and P. Stuhlmacher, pp. –. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth () In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins. London: SCM Press. Schweitzer, A. () Paul and his Interpreters. London: A & C Black. Schweitzer, A. () The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle. London: A & C Black. Sheppard, Gerald T. () William Perkins’s Exposition among Seventeenth-Century Commentaries –. In A Commentary on Galatians, by William Perkins. New York: Pilgrim Press. Sim, David C. () The Gospel of Matthew and Christian Judaism: The History and Social Setting of the Matthean Community. SNTW. Edinburgh: T & T Clark. Smalley, Beryl () The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Smith, Abraham () Putting ‘Paul’ Back Together Again: William Wells Brown’s Clotel and Black Abolitionist Approaches to Paul. Semeia /: –. Snyder, C.A., ed. () Sources of South German/Austrian Anabaptism. Kitchener, Ont.: Pandora Press. Souter, Alexander () The Text and Canon of the New Testament. London: Duckworth. Souter, Alexander (–) Thirteen Epistles. In Pelagius: Expositiones XIII Epistularum Pauli. Texts and Studies: Contributions to Biblical and Patristic Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spurgeon, C.H. () The Allegories of Sarah and Hagar. In The New Park Street Pulpit, pp. –. www.spurgeon.org. Staab, Karl () Pauluskommentare aus der griechischen Kirche: Aus Katenenhandschriften gesammelt und herausgegeben. Neutestamentliche Abhandlungen. Münster: Aschendorff. Stendahl, Krister () Paul among Jews and Gentiles. Philadelphia: Fortress. Stowers, Stanley () Letter Writing in Greco-Roman Antiquity. Library of Early Christianity. Philadelphia: Westminster. Strack, H. and Billerbeck, P. () Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch. Munich: C.H. Beck. Swartley, Willard M. () Slavery, Sabbath, War and Slavery: Case Issues in Biblical Interpretation. Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press. Taylor, Nicholas () Paul, Antioch and Jerusalem. Sheffield: JSOT Press. Theissen, Gerd () The Social Setting of Pauline Christianity. SNTW. Edinburgh: T & T Clark. Theissen, Gerd () Social Reality and the Early Christians. Minneapolis: Fortress. Theissen, Gerd () A Theory of Primitive Christian Religion. London: SCM Press. Theodore of Mopsuestia () Theodori Episcopi Mopsuesteni in Epistolas B. Pauli Commentarii: The Latin Version with the Greek Fragments. Ed. H.B. Swete. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Torrell, Jean Pierre, OP () St. Thomas Aquinas. Vol : The Person and His Work. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Ubertinus de Casali () Arbor Vitae Crucifixae Jesu. Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo. Ueda, Shizuteru () Jesus in Contemporary Japanese Zen. With special regard to Keiji Nishitani. In Buddhist Perceptions of Jesus: Papers of the Third Conference of the European Network of Buddhist-Christian Studies (St Ottilien ). Ed. Perry Schmidt-Leukel and G. Köberlin. St. Ottilien: EOS Verlag.



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Van Braght, T.J. () Martyrs Mirror. Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press. Victorinus, Marius () Marius Victorinus’ Commentary on Galatians. Introduction, translation, and notes: Stephen Andr Cooper. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Watson, G.D.C. () Fruit-Bearing and Service. In Addresses on Holiness (Second Series) Delivered at the Star Hall Convention, Manchester, October th to th, . Ed. I.S. Leonard, pp. –. London: S.W. Partridge. Watson, Philip S. () Editor’s Preface. In A Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians by Martin Luther, pp. –. London: James Clarke & Co. Ltd. Way, David V. () The Lordship of Christ: Ernst Käsemann’s Interpretation of Paul’s Theology. Oxford Theological Monographs. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Weinandy, T.G., Keating, D.A. and Yocum, J.P., eds. () Aquinas on Scripture: An Introduction to His Biblical Commentaries. London: T & T Clark. Weiss, Johannes () Earliest Christianity: A History of the Period A.D. –. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith. Wesley, John () Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament. London. White, Caroline () The Correspondence (–) between Jerome and Augustine of Hippo. Lewistown, NY: Edwin Mellen. Wiles, Maurice () The Divine Apostle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilken, R.L. () John Chrysostom and the Jews. Berkeley: University of California Press. Williams, Demetrius K. () The Bible and Models of Liberation in the African American Experience. In Yet with a Steady Beat. Ed. Randall C. Bailey, pp. –. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature. Williams, G.H. and Mergal, A.M. () Spiritual and Anabaptist Writers. London: SCM Press. Wilson, R. McL. () The Gospel of Philip. London: A.R. Mowbray. Wingren, Gustaf () Luther on Vocation. Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press. Wrede, William () Paulus. Halle: Gebauer-Schwetschke. Wrede, William () Paul. London: P. Green. Wright, Louis B. () William Perkins: Elizabethan Apostle of ‘Practical Divinity’, Huntington Library Quarterly  (Jan. ): –. Young, Frances () The Art of Performance: Towards a Theology of Holy Scripture. London: Darton, Longman and Todd. Young, Frances () Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Illustrations

Plate 1

Papal seal

Plate 2

Guido Reni, St Peter and St Paul

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Plate 3

El Greco, The Apostles, St Peter and St Paul

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Plate 4

Rembrandt, Two Old Men Disputing (St Peter and St Paul)

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Plate 5

St Paul preaching to the Galatians, medieval manuscript

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Plate 6

Valentin de Bourgogne, Paul Writing his Epistles

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Indexes Index of Subjects

Note: Page references in bold type indicate Glossary entries, while those in italics indicate illustrations. Abraham and curse of the Law, –,  as father of believers, –, ,  patristic interpretation, –,  and Sarah and Hagar, , , , – as source of blessing, –, , –, , –, –,  Acts and Galatians, –,  historicity, – Aland, Barbara, –

Albertus Magnus, , ,  Albigensians,  Alexandria, and allegorical exegesis, ,  allegory and Augustine,  and Calvin,  and Origen, ,  of Sarah and Hagar, , , , – Ambrosiaster, , , ,  and Sarah and Hagar, ,  Anabaptists, , , ,  and Luther, , , , , , –,  angels, and the Law, , , , , , 

Galatians Through the Centuries, First Edition. John Riches. © 2013 John Riches. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Index of Subjects anthropology in Aquinas, –, – in Bultmann, , ,  in Chrysostom,  dualist, , –, –, ,  Antioch and historical exegesis, , , ,  and Nicene church, – Antiochene dispute, , , , , , – Acts and Galatians,  in Aquinas, – in Augustine, –, ,  in Calvin, , – in Chrysostom, , , , , –,  in Jerome, , , , –,  in Luther, ,  in Marcion, , , , – in modern period, – patristic readings, , – in Perkins,  apocalypticism, – in Martyn, –, , – and nature of evil, – in Paul, , –, –, –,  in Schweitzer, –, –,  apostles apostolic authority, , –, –, , , ,  false see opponents of Paul Aquila,  Aquinas, Thomas, , –,  and apostolic authority,  and Augustine, , ,  and conversion of Paul, ,  and heirs and slaves, –,  and Judaism,  and justification by faith, –, , ,  and Law, , , ; and blessing of Abraham, –; and curse, –; and experience of the Spirit, –, ; fulfilment, , –, , ; and justification, –, –; purpose and limits, – lectures on Paul,  literal and spiritual meanings, –



and love,  and relationship of Acts and Galatians,  and structure of Galatians,  Summa theologiae, , , ,  and witchcraft,  see also Antiochene dispute; Aristotle; circumcision; creation, new; faith; flesh and spirit; grace; Holy Spirit; new life in Christ; Sarah and Hagar allegory Arianism, ,  Aristotle, ,  and Aquinas, –, , , , , ,  Artotyrites,  asceticism and Aquinas, , , – and Calvin,  and Chrysostom, –, ,  and Gnosticism,  and Luther, ,  and Marcion,  assurance in Calvin,  in Luther,  in Puritanism, , , , ,  atonement,  in Chrysostom,  in Dunn, ,  in Hilgenfeld,  in Lightfoot,  in Luther, – in Perkins,  substitutionary, , ,  Augustine of Hippo, xii, , – and Abraham, , – and allegory, – and Antiochene dispute, –, ,  and Aquinas, ,  and authority of Paul,  and the church, ,  and conversion of Paul,  and Donatists, –, ,  and evil,  and grace, –, ,  and heirs and slaves, – and Judaism, –, ,  and justification by faith, –, 



Index of Subjects

Augustine of Hippo (cont’d) and Law; and curse, –; and experience of the Spirit, ; fulfilment, –, ; and justification, –; purpose and limits, , ,  and love,  and Manichees, , , –, , , , , ,  and manifestations of the Spirit, ,  On Christian Teaching,  and opening of Galatians,  on the Scriptures, ,  and self-consciousness,  see also creation, new; flesh and spirit; new life in Christ; righteousness; Sarah and Hagar allegory authority apostolic, , –, –, , ,  of church, , , –, , – of Scripture, , , ,  of state,  Avicenna (Ibn Sina), ,  baptism, and new life, , , , , , , –, ,  Barclay, John, ,  Barrett, C.K.,  Barth, Karl, , ,  Basil the Great, , ,  Baur, Ferdinand Christian, , –, , ,  and Abraham,  and Acts, – and Antiochene dispute, – Church History of the First Three Centuries, ,  and conversion of Paul, –, – and early Christianity, –, , , –, –,  influence, –,  and Jerusalem conference, –, – and Judaism, –, , ,  and justification, –, , ,  and Law, –, –, ,  and Marcion,  Symbolik und Mythologie, , 

see also consciousness; flesh and spirit; Sarah and Hagar allegory Bede, Venerable, , ,  Bengel, Johann Albrecht, , ,  Bethune, Mary McLeod,  Betz, H.D., –,  Beza, Theodore, ,  Blackman, E.C.,  Bornkamm, Karin,  Bourgogne, Valentin de,  Bousset, Wilhelm, , , ,  Boyarin, Daniel, –, –, , – Breward, Ian,  Brown, Peter, ,  Bucer, Martin, –, , ,  Budé, Guillaume, ,  Bullinger, Heinrich, –, , ,  bulls, papal, ,  Bultmann, Rudolf, , ,  on ethics,  and existentialism, , –, , , , , ,  on faith, , – on Holy Spirit,  on justification, , –,  on the Law, –, – and Luther, , , , – on nature of evil, –,  on new creation,  on spiritual powers,  Bunyan, John, , , , –, , ,  Cajetan, Thomas, ,  Calvin, John, , , –, ,  on Abraham, –,  on Antiochene dispute, , – on authority of Paul,  on conversion of Paul, –,  on diversity of interpretation, –,  on evil, ,  on Galatians and Acts, , – on grace, ,  on heirs and slaves, – Institutes of the Christian Religion, , , ,  on Jerusalem conference,  on justification by faith, –, , –, 

Index of Subjects on Law, , , ; and curse, –; fulfilment, –, ; and justification, –; and new life in Christ, –; purpose and limits, –,  on love,  on manifestation of the Spirit, – Psychopannychia,  on righteousness, , –, – on theological teaching of Paul, – see also covenant; creation, new; flesh and spirit; new life in Christ; Sarah and Hagar allegory Calvinism see federal theology; Perkins, William canon, and Marcion, –,  Cappadocian Fathers, ,  Cartwright, Thomas, ,  Cathars, ,  Cerdo (Gnostic),  Christianity Catholic, , , , ,  divisions in, , , – Eastern/Western,  and history of religion, , –, , , ,  Jewish, , , – and Judaism, –, –, –, , , , – Nicene, – Pauline, –, , , , , –, , ,  Petrine,  and universalism, –, , , , , , , ,  Chrysostom, John, xii, , –,  on Abraham, –,  on Antiochene church, – on Antiochene dispute, , , , , –,  on authority of Paul,  on Christian diversity,  commentary on Matthew,  on conversion of Paul, – on dualism and evil, , – on heirs and slaves, ,  on Jerusalem conference,  on the Jews, , –, , –, , , 



on Judaism,  on justification by faith, –, , ,  on the Law; and blessing of Abraham, –; and curse, ; fulfilment, –, ; and justification, ; purpose and limits, , , , , ,  on manifestation of the Spirit, ,  on new creation, – on opening of Galatians, – and rhetoric, , , , , ,  on structure of Galatians, – see also flesh and spirit; new life in Christ; Sarah and Hagar allegory church in Aquinas, ,  and authority, , , –, , – in Baur, , ,  in Calvin, –, – in Chrysostom,  as heavenly Jerusalem, ,  and Law, – in Lightfoot,  in Luther, , –,  in Marcion, , , –, – in Perkins,  and sacraments,  Church of England, ,  church and state, , ,  circumcision in Aquinas, –, – in Augustine, –,  in Chrysostom, , – in Cudworth,  and Jewish Christians, , , –,  and Jewish identity, ,  in Lightfoot, – in Luther, –, – in Martyn, – Paul’s view, –, , , ,  Peter’s view, ,  of Timothy, , , , , –,  of Titus, , –, –, , ,  Clement of Alexandria, , , ,  commentary form, –, ,  and Bucer, ,  and Bullinger, –



Index of Subjects

commentary form (cont’d) and Calvin, – in Greek, , ,  in Latin,  and Lightfoot, – and Melanchthon,  commentatio simplex, – conscience, –,  consciousness in Augustine,  in Baur, –, –, –, , , –, , –, , , ,  in Bultmann,  in Hilgenfeld, –, , , ,  in Lightfoot, – and the other,  in Schleiermacher,  conversatio, in Aquinas, ,  conversion, as receiving the Spirit,  conversion of Paul, – in Acts, , , – Cooper, Stephen A.,  covenant in Aquinas, – in Calvin, , , , –, ,  in Chrysostom,  in Dunn, – and federal theology, , , ,  in Judaism, ,  in Lightfoot, , – in Perkins, –, , ,  in Sanders, ,  creation, new, , , , , –, – in Aquinas, , –,  in Augustine,  in Bultmann,  in Calvin, – in Chrysostom, – in Cudworth, – dualist readings, ,  in Hilgenfeld,  in Lightfoot,  in Luther, , –,  in Martyn, – Cudworth, Ralph, , , – culture, Christian/classical, , , – Cyprian, 

Davies, W.D.,  desire, , , –, –, –, –, –,  devil in Ambrosiaster,  in Calvin,  in Luther, , –, , –, , ,  in Perkins, , ,  Diodore of Tarsus, ,  Dodd, C.H.,  Dominicans,  Donatism, –, ,  dualism of flesh and spirit, –, –, ,  Gnostic, , , –, , –,  and heirs and slaves, –,  Manichaean, , –, , , –, –,  Marcionite, –, –, , , , –, ,  and new creation, ,  Dunn, J.D.G. and apocalyptic, , – and circumcision of Titus,  and conversion of Paul, –,  and flesh and spirit, – and Galatians and Acts,  and Jerusalem conference, – and the Law, –,  and manifestation of the Spirit,  and Paul and Judaism, –, , – Eastern Orthodoxy, and Chrysostom, xii, ,  Ebeling, Gerhard, ,  Eck, Johann, , ,  Eckhart, Meister, – election, –, , – in Augustine,  in Calvin, , , , , – in Perkins, –, , , ,  in Spurgeon,  Ellicott, Charles John, , ,  Encratites,  Epiphanius,  Erasmus, Desiderius, –, , , , 

Index of Subjects ethics see creation, new; love, of neighbour; new life in Christ ethnicity, and new life in Christ, –, – Eusebius of Emesa, ,  evil, – in Augustine, – dualist readings, , –, , – forensic readings, –,  in Luther,  in Manichaeism, , , – modern readings, – patristic readings, –; in Perkins, ,  existentialism,  and Bultmann, , –, , , , ,  experience, religious in Baur, –, –, –, , , – in Calvin,  in Lightfoot, , –, – in Sanders, –,  see also mysticism Eznik of Kolb, ,  Faber Stapulensis (Lefèvre d’Etaples), , ,  faith of Abraham, –,  in Aquinas, , , –, – in Augustine,  in Baur, –, ,  in Bultmann, , – in Calvin, –, – as confession,  informed by love, , –, , , , , –,  as infused, –, , , , – and knowledge,  and Law, –,  in Lightfoot, – in Luther, , , –, –, – as obedience,  in Perkins, –, –, –, – in Sanders, – and works, –, , –,  see also justification by faith; new life in Christ Farel, Guillaume, 



Faustus of Mileve,  federal theology, , , ,  feminist theology, – festivals, –,  fiducialism,  flesh and spirit, , , , – in Aquinas, , – in Augustine, , , – in Baur, ,  in Calvin, – in Chrysostom, , – and desires, , , –, –, –, –, –,  and dualism, –,  in Dunn, – in Hilgenfeld,  in Lightfoot,  in Luther, –, , , –,  in Martyn, , –,  in Perkins, – in Sanders,  in Theodore,  works of the flesh, , , ,  food laws, , , , , ,  Fortunatus, , ,  Foster, Paul,  Franciscans,  freedom, and the Law,  Frei, Hans,  Froehlich, Karlfried,  Galatia former state of Galatians, , –,  location of Paul’s congregations, – Galatians (epistle) and Acts, – ambiguities, , , , , , , , ,  epistolary greeting, – liberationist and feminist readings, – literary and historical context, , , , , –,  structure, – as subversive, xiii, , – text, –, –,  Gennadius, 



Index of Subjects

Gentiles and blessing of Abraham, –, , , , , , ,  as heirs, –, –, , , – and Judaizers, , –, , , –,  and Peter, –, –, , ,  George, Charles and George, Katherine,  Glock, Paul, ,  Glossa Ordinaria, , , , ,  Gnosticism,  and Antiochene dispute,  and dualism, , , –, , –,  and Law, ,  and Marcion, , – Gospel of the Egyptians,  gospel and Law, – in Baur, , –,  in Bultmann, ,  in Calvin,  and Jerusalem council,  and Jewish Christians, –, –, , ,  in Luther, , , , , – in Marcion, –, – in Perkins, , – Gospel of Philip, –, –, ,  grace in Aquinas, –, , , –, , , , , – in Augustine, –, ,  in Baur,  in Bultmann, ,  in Calvin, ,  in Chrysostom, – and the church,  in Lightfoot,  in Luther, , , , , , ,  in Perkins, –, , –,  preventing, – and sacraments, , ,  and scholasticism,  in Spurgeon, – and works, ,  Greco, El (Domenikos Theotokopoulos), The Apostles, St Peter and St Paul,  Gregory of Nazianzen, , 

Gregory of Nyssa, ,  Grotius, Hugo, ,  Grynée (Grynaeus), Simon, ,  Halberthal, Moshe,  Hammond, Jupiter,  Hardy, Thomas, ,  Harnack, Adolf von, , , , , , , , ,  Hays, R.B.,  Hegel, G.W.F., , , , , , ,  Heidegger, Martin, , , , ,  heirs, believers as, –, , , –,  Heitmüller, W., ,  Helvidius,  Heracleon, ,  Hilary of Poitiers, and circumcision of Titus,  Hilgenfeld, Adolf, – and apostolic authority,  and conversion of Paul, ,  and heirs and slaves, – and Law, , –, –, , , , – and love,  and manifestation of the Spirit, – and nature of evil,  and self-consciousness, –, , , ,  see also creation, new; flesh and spirit; new life in Christ; Sarah and Hagar allegory Hippolytus, ,  historical criticism, , , , , ,  and Ellicott, , ,  and Hilgenfeld,  and Lightfoot, –,  and nature of evil, – history of religions school, , –, , , , , , , ,  Hoffmann, R. Joseph,  Holiness movement, – Holland, W.,  Holy Spirit and apostolic authority,  in Aquinas, –, – in Augustine,  in Baur, 

Index of Subjects in Bultmann,  in Calvin, , –, , – in Chrysostom, , – fruits, , , –, , , , ,  Galatians’ experience of, – and Gentiles,  gift of, –, ,  in Heitmüller,  in Hilgenfeld, –, – in Lightfoot,  in Luther, –, , –, ,  and new life, , , , –, , – in Perkins, –, , , , – and regeneration, , ,  see also walking in the Spirit Hooker, Richard, , ,  hope, of righteousness, , , , , , –, , –, – Hort, F.J.A., –,  humanism, , , , ,  Hutterites, , ,  hypocrisy and Paul,  and Peter, , ,  Ibn Rushd (Averroës), ,  Ibn Sina (Avicenna), , ,  Idealism, German, , , , , ,  Ignatius of Antioch, , ,  intention, authorial, xii–xiii,  introspection, , , , ,  Irenaeus of Lyon, –, ,  Against the Heresies, , , – Jaeger, Werner,  James (brother of Jesus),  Jauss, Hans-Robert, xiii, – Jerome,  on allegorical interpretation, –,  on Antiochene dispute, , , , –,  on apostolic authority,  on the church, ,  commentary on Galatians, xii, , –, ,  on conversion of Paul, 



on dualism, ,  on Jerusalem conference,  on justification,  on the Law, , , – Jerusalem earthly and heavenly, , , , –, ,  Paul’s visits to,  Jerusalem church, , –, ,  Jerusalem conference, – in Acts and Galatians, , – and circumcision of Titus, , , – nature of the dispute, – Jesus Christ and apostolic authority, –, – and conversion of Paul, – and curse of the Law, – and law of Christ, – as mediator,  see also new life in Christ Jewish Christians, , –, , –, –,  in Augustine, , – in Baur, , – in Chrysostom, , , –, ,  in Dunn,  in Jerome, ,  in Lightfoot,  John Chrysostom see Chrysostom John of the Cross, St, – Jowett, Benjamin, –, –,  Jubilees, Book of, , ,  Judaism/Jews in Aquinas, – in Baur, –, , ,  in Calvin, – in Chrysostom, , –, , –, , , ,  festivals, –,  in Hilgenfeld, , – Jews as heirs, –, –,  in Lightfoot, –,  in Luther, , –, , , , ,  in Marcion,  nationalistic, , , –, ,  and Paul, –, –, , – and supercessionism,  see also circumcision; food laws; Law; Pharisaism; sabbath law



Index of Subjects

judgement, –, –,  justice, –, ,  justification by faith, , , , , –,  in Aquinas, –, , ,  in Augustine, – in Baur, –, , ,  in Bultmann, , –,  in Calvin, –, , –, , –,  in Chrysostom, –, , ,  forensic view, , ,  in Lightfoot, – and love,  in Luther, , , , , –, , –, , , – in Marcion, ,  in Perkins, –, – in Sanders, , –,  in Schweitzer,  see also righteousness justification by works, , , , , ,  in Aquinas, –,  in Augustine, ,  in Baur,  in Bultmann,  in Calvin, ,  in Dunn,  in Luther, , , , , –, – in Marcion,  and Pelagianism,  in Perkins, –, , , , , – in scholasticism, – in Spurgeon, – Kant, Immanuel, –, , , ,  Karlstadt, Andreas Bodenstein, ,  Käsemann, Ernst, , , –, , ,  Keble, John, ,  Kierkegaard, Søren Aaby, –, ,  knowledge, and faith,  Kümmel, Werner Georg,  Lagrange, le P.M.-J., , ,  Law, , –, – attraction to Gentiles, –

and blessing of Abraham, – ceremonial, , , , , –, , , –, , –,  of Christ, – and curse, , , –,  and experience of the Spirit, – and faith, – fulfilment, –, , , , – giving, , , –, ,  and heirs and slaves, , – and Jewish Christians, , , –, ,  and justification, – moral, , , , , , , , , ,  and new life in Christ, – purpose and limits, –; and awareness of sin, ; civil use, , , , , , ; educational use, , , , , –, , – in scholasticism, – and table-fellowship,  as temporary, , , , , , , , , , ,  see also Aquinas, Thomas; Augustine of Hippo; Baur, Ferdinand Christian; Bultmann, Rudolf; Calvin, John; Chrysostom, John; gospel and Law; Hilgenfeld, Adolf; Judaism/Jews; justification by works; Lightfoot, Joseph Barber; Luther, Martin; Marcion; Perkins, William lectio divina,  Lefèvre d’Etaples see Faber Stapulensis Lessing, G.E., , , –,  Libanius, , ,  liberalism, theological, ,  liberty, –, –,  in Aquinas, ,  in Calvin, , , –,  in Hilgenfeld,  and libertinism, ,  in Luther, , , , , , , –,  in Origen,  in Perkins, , –, , ,  see also slavery

Index of Subjects Lietzmann, Hans, ,  Lightfoot, Joseph Barber, , – on Abraham, – on Acts and Galatians, ,  on apostolic authority, – on Augustine, ,  and Baur, , , –, , ,  on circumcision of Titus, – on conversion of Paul, – on heirs and slaves, – and historical criticism, –,  and history of religion,  on Jewish Christians,  on justification, – on Law, , –, , –, , –, –, – on location of Galatian congregations,  on love, – and Luther, , , , , –,  on nature of evil,  on witchcraft,  see also creation, new; flesh and spirit; new life in Christ; Sarah and Hagar allegory literary history and commentary form, – methodology, – Longenecker, R.N.,  love and faith, , –, , , , , ,  and the Law, –, , – of neighbour, , , , , , –,  Luther, Martin, – on Abraham, – on Antiochene dispute, ,  on Augustine, , ,  on authority of Paul, – and Bultmann, , , , – on conversion of Paul,  on evil, – on Galatians, , , , , ,  on heirs and slaves, –, –,  interpretation of Paul, xii on Jerusalem conference,  on justification, , , , , –, , , –



on Law, , , , ; and curse, –; fulfilment, –, , ; and Galatians’ former state, –; and justification, , –, ; purpose and limits, –, ; and the Spirit, – on Lightfoot, , , , –,  on manifestation of the Spirit, – Preface to the Latin Writings, – on religious experience,  on two kingdoms, ,  on vocation, , , – see also creation, new; flesh and spirit; grace; Judaism/Jews; new life in Christ; righteousness; Sarah and Hagar allegory Lutheranism, , , ,  and Jews xii,  see also Baur, Ferdinand Christian Luz, Ulrich, xi Maccabean revolt, ,  McGinn, Bernard,  Maimonides, Moses, ,  Manichaeism, , , –, , , , , ,  and Cathars,  dualism, , –, , , , –, –,  Marcion, , –, , ,  on Abraham,  on Antiochene dispute, , , , – on Augustine,  on the church, , , –, – on circumcision of Titus,  and distortion of the gospel, –,  on Gnosticism, , – on heirs and slaves, – on Jerusalem conference,  on justification by faith,  on Law, –, –, –, , , –, ,  on righteousness,  and text of Galatians, –, , ,  see also dualism Marcionites, ,  Marpeck, Pilgram, , 



Index of Subjects

Martyn, J. Louis and apocalypticism, –, , – and covenantal nomism,  and faith, – and flesh and spirit, , –,  and Law,  and new life in Christ, – and rectification in Christ, ,  May, G.,  Meeks, Wayne A., , – Melanchthon, Philipp, , –, , , ,  Meletius of Antioch, ,  merit in Aquinas,  in Augustine, ,  in Calvin,  in Luther, , , ,  in Perkins, , – Meyer, Heinrich August Wilhelm, ,  miracles, –, –,  Mitchell, Margaret, xi,  Montagu, James,  Montanists,  Morgan, Robert, xiii,  Morison, Samuel Eliot,  Moses, and giving of the Law, –, ,  Müller, Julius, – Müntzer, Thomas, , ,  Musonius Rufus,  Muto, Kazuo,  mysticism, , –, – nature, and grace, – neighbour, love of, , , , , , –,  new life in Christ, , –, –, , – and apocalyptic,  in Aquinas, , –, , – in Augustine, –, , –,  and baptism, , , , , , , –,  in Bultmann, – in Calvin, –, –, – in Chrysostom, , , – and gender and race, – in Hilgenfeld, –, –

in Lightfoot, , –, – in Luther, , –, , –, – in Perkins, , , – in Sanders, –, – in Schweitzer, – in Watson,  New Testament and Law,  and Tendenzkritik, , ,  Niebuhr, Barthold Georg, ,  Nietzsche, Friedrich, ,  nihilism, Western, – Nilgren, Anders,  Nishida, Kirato, – Nishitani, Keiji, –,  nomism, covenantal, , , –, , , –,  Oberman, Heiko, ,  Old Testament in Aquinas,  in Augustine,  in Baur, ,  in Lightfoot,  in Marcion, –, ,  in Perkins, ,  opponents of Paul, –, , , , ,  in Aquinas,  in Augustine, ,  in Baur, –, – in Chrysostom, ,  and figure of Abraham,  and Jerusalem apostles, , , – in Luther,  in Lutheranism,  Origen,  and allegorical interpretation, , ,  on Antiochene dispute, , ,  commentary on Galatians, , , – and dualism,  on heirs and slaves,  on justification,  Orthodoxy, xii, , ,  papacy see Roman Catholicism Parker, T.H.L., ,  participation in Christ, , –, –, , , 

Index of Subjects Passalorynchites,  Patte, Daniel, xi Pauck, Wilhelm,  Paul, –, ,  apostolic authority, , –, –, ,  apostolic independence, – conversion, – and Jerusalem conference, – Jewish-Christian opponents, , , –, , , –, –, ,  and Judaism, –, –, , – and self-consciousness, –, , –, , , ,  and women, – see also Antiochene dispute Peasants’ Revolt, , ,  Pelagianism, ,  Pelagius, ,  perfection, Christian,  in Aquinas, ,  in Augustine,  in Calvin, ,  in Chrysostom,  in Cudworth,  in Luther, , , ,  in Spurgeon,  Perkins, William, , – on Abraham, – on Antiochene dispute,  on apostolic succession,  and Calvin, – on conversion of Paul, – on evil, ,  A Golden Chain, –,  on heirs and slaves, – on Judaism,  on justification, –, – on Law, –, –, –, –, –,  on manifestation of the Spirit, –,  Of the combat of flesh and spirit,  on preaching, , , , , – on predestination, –, , – Treatise Tending unto a Declaration,  on vocation, , ,  The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience, 



on witchcraft, –,  see also covenant; flesh and spirit; new life in Christ; Sarah and Hagar allegory Peter, – and Gentile Christians, –, –, , ,  and Jewish Christians, , –,  stay in Antioch, ,  and venial/mortal sin,  see also Antiochene dispute Peter Lombard, Sentences, –, ,  Pharisaism, and Paul, –,  Philo Judaeus, , , –, ,  Pietism, ,  Plato, , , , , – Plumer, Eric, , , , –,  Pole, Card. Reginald,  preaching in Barth,  in Baur, , ,  in Calvin, ,  in Chrysostom, –,  in Lightfoot, ,  in Luther, –, , – of Paul, , , , , , , –, ,  in Perkins, , , , , – predestination, see election Primasius, and the Law,  Protestantism cultural,  Orthodoxy, –,  providence, special,  Pseudo-Clementine Homilies, , ,  Pseudo-Dionysius, – Puritanism, – and assurance, , , , ,  and covenant, –, ,  and Law,  and Luther,  see also Perkins, William Räisänen, Heikki,  Ramus, Peter,  reader and commentary form, – expectations, – and text, xii–xiii, –



Index of Subjects

reason, and revelation, – redemption in Bousset,  and Judaism, ,  in Luther, ,  in Wrede,  Reformation fragmentation,  and impact of Galatians,  and the Law, – and Paul,  Radical, , –, ,  see also Calvin, John; Luther, Martin; Perkins, William; Puritanism regeneration in Calvin, , , , , – in Cudworth,  in Lightfoot,  in Perkins, , , , – Reginald of Piperno, ,  Reimarus, H.S., , , ,  religion, privatization, ,  Renan, Ernest, , ,  Reni, Guido, St Peter and St Paul,  revelation and Paul, , –, –, –,  and reason, –,  and self-consciousness, – rhetoric and Chrysostom, , , , , ,  and Jerome,  and Luther,  and Paul, , , , , ,  righteousness of Abraham, –,  in Aquinas, ,  in Augustine, , , –, ,  in Baur,  in Bultmann, –,  in Calvin, , –, – in Chrysostom,  and hope, , , , , , –, , –, – imputation; in Aquinas, , ; in Baur, , , ; in Calvin, , – , , , , ; and Council of Trent, –; in Luther, –, , –, ; in Melanchthon, , ; in Perkins, –, 

and the Law, –,  of Law and faith, –, , , ,  in Lightfoot,  in Luther, –, , , , , , –, , –, –, –,  in Marcion,  moral/religious,  in Perkins, ,  in Sanders, –,  of works, ,  Ritschl, Albrecht, , , ,  Roman Catholicism in Calvin, –, , –,  in Cudworth, – in Jerome, xii,  in Luther, –, , , ,  in Perkins, –,  see also Trent, Council Ruether, Rosemary Radford,  sabbath law, , , , , ,  sacraments in Aquinas,  in Augustine,  in Calvin,  and grace, , ,  and Law,  in Perkins, , , ,  see also baptism sanctification in Luther, , ,  in Perkins, ,  Sanders, E.P. and apocalyptic, , , , ,  and covenantal nomism, , , –,  and faith, – and flesh and spirit,  and Judaism, –, –, , , ,  and justification, , –,  Sarah and Hagar allegory, , , , – in Aquinas, – in Augustine, –,  in Baur,  in Calvin, , , – in Chrysostom, , – in Hilgenfeld, 

Index of Subjects in Lightfoot, , , , – in Luther, , , – patristic interpretations, – in Perkins, – Schelling, Friedrich von, ,  Schleiermacher, F.D.E., , , , ,  Schlier, Heinrich, –, ,  Schneckenburger, M.,  scholasticism, , ,  and Calvin, – and Luther, –, –, –, – Schottroff, Luise,  Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth, – Schweitzer, A., xi, –,  and apocalypticism, –, –,  Schwenkfeld, Kaspar von, ,  Scripture allegorical sense, , , , ,  anagogical sense, , ,  christological sense,  cultural reading,  infallibility,  literal sense, –, , –, ,  spiritual sense, –, ,  tropological sense, , ,  Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, , , ,  Seripando, Girolamo,  Severianus,  Simon Magus, ,  sin in Aquinas, –, – in Baur,  in Bultmann, – and the church, –,  in Erasmus,  in Hilgenfeld, ,  in Luther, , , –, ,  in Marcion,  mortal,  in Perkins, – venial, ,  in Watson,  see also evil slavery to elemental powers, , –, – and the Law, , , –, , ,  and liberationist reading of Galatians, 



and Sarah and Hagar allegory, – and sonship, , –, , , , , ,  Smalley, Beryl, – soul in Aquinas, , , , ,  in Chrysostom, – in Cudworth,  in John of the Cross, – see also flesh and spirit Spurgeon, Charles, – Staupitz, Johann von, ,  Stendahl, Krister, ,  Strauss, David Friedrich, , ,  table-fellowship,  Taylor, Nicholas,  Tendenzkritik, , ,  Tertullian, Quintus Septimus Florens, ,  and Marcion, –, , , , , –, ,  text as canonical, – and commentary, – and reader, xii–xiii, – as world-building,  Theissen, Gerd,  Theodore of Mopsuestia, , ,  and Abraham,  and apostolic authority of Paul,  and classical culture,  and Judaism,  and life in the Spirit,  and nature of evil, – and Sarah and Hagar,  Theodotus (Gnostic), –, ,  Thomas Aquinas see Aquinas, Thomas Timothy, circumcision, , , , , –,  Titus, circumcision, , –, –, , ,  Trent, Council, , , –, ,  Tübingen school, , , ,  Tyndale, William, , ,  typology, –,  Ubertino of Casale, ,  Ueda, Shizuteru, –



Index of Subjects

universalism, Christian, –, , , , , , , ,  Valentinus, Valentinians, , , ,  Valerianus Magni, ,  Victorinus, Marius, –, , ,  on Antiochene dispute,  on authority of Paul, – on circumcision of Titus,  on justification, ,  on Sarah and Hagar, , – on sonship,  vocation, , , , –, – Vulgate, , , ,  Waldensians, ,  walking in the Spirit, , , , , –, – Watson, G.D., , – Watts, Isaac, , 

Weiss, Johannes, ,  Wesley, Charles, , ,  Wesley, John, , , , ,  Westcott, Brooke Foss, –, ,  Wilken, Robert,  will in Augustine, , – in Calvin, , –,  in Chrysostom, , – in John of the Cross,  in Paul,  in Perkins, , –, ,  witchcraft, –,  women, in early Christianity, – works see justification by works Wrede, William, , ,  Young, Frances,  Zen Buddhism, Kyoto school, – Zwingli, Ulrich, , , , , 

Index of Citations Old Testament Genesis :,  –,  :,  :,  :,  :,  :,  Leviticus :, ,  ,  :,  :,  Numbers :,  Deuteronomy :,  :,  :, –

:,  :, , , , ,  :,  :,  :,  :,  Psalms :,  :,  :,  :,  :,  :,  Isaiah :,  :,  ,  :–,  :,  :, 

:,  Jeremiah :, ,  :,  Hosea :,  Amos :,  Habakkuk : (LXX) , – Zechariah :,  New Testament Matthew :,  :,  :,  :, 

Luke :,  John :,  :,  :,  :,  :–,  :ff.,  :,  :,  :,  :,  Acts :,  :,  :,  :–,  ,  :, ,  :–, 

Index of Citations ,  :, ,  :–,  , ,  :–,  ,  :,  –,  ,  :–,  , , , –,  :–,  :,  :–:,  :–,  :,  :,  :,  :,  –,  :,  ,  ,  :,  Romans :,  :, ,  :,  :,  :–,  :, ,  :,  , ,  :,  :–,  :, , , , ,  :,  :,  :, ,  –,  :–,  :,  :,  :,  , , ,  :,  :, 

:,  :,  :,  :, ,  :ff.,  :, ,  :, ,  :–,  :,  :, ,  :,  :ff.,  :,  :,  :, , ,  :,  :,  :, , ,  :,  :,  :,  ,  :,  :,  :,  :,   Corinthians :–,  :,  :, ,  :,  :–,  :,  :, – :–,  :–,  :,  :,  :,  :,  :,  :,  :,  :,  :,  :ff.,  :,  :, 

 Corinthians :,  :,  :,  :,  :, ,  :,  :,  :,  :,  :–,  :, , , ,  ,  :,  :–,  :,  :,  :–,  :,  Galatians –, , ,  :–, – :–, – :–,  :,  :, , , , ,  :–,  :–, – :–,  :–, ,  :, ,  :,  :,  :, , ,  :–, – :–,  :,  :–, ,  :–, ,  :, –, ,  :–:,  :,  :,  :,  :–,  :–, –, 



:,  :–, ,  :,  :, , ,  :–, ,  :,  :–,  :,  :–, ,  :, , ,  :–, – :–,  :, ,  :, ,  :, ,  :–, , – :–, – :, , –, , , , ,  :,  :, ,  :–, ,  :, ,  :, , , , , , , –, ,  , –,  :–:,  :–, – :–, – :, ,  :–,  :–,  :, , , –, ,  :, , ,  :, ,  :, , , , , , ,  :–, ,  :, , ,  :–, ,  :, , ,  :,  :, 



Index of Citations

Galatians (cont’d) :, –, , , ,  :,  :,  :–, – :–, ,  :–, ,  :–:,  :–, ,  :, , , , –,  :, ,  :–,  :, , , , ,  :, , , ,  :, , ,  :–,  :–, – :, ,  :, , , , , , –, ,  :, – :–, – :–, –,  :, , ,  :–,  :–, 

:, ,  :, ,  :, ,  :–,  :, ,  :–,  :, , ,  :,  :–, – :,  :–, – :,  :,  :, , ,  :,  :,  , – :–, – :, , ,  :,  :–, – :, , , , – :, , , , , , , , –, , ,  :,  :–, , – :, , , 

:, , , , , ,  :–,  :–, –, , , – :–,  :,  :, , , , , , –, , –, –, ,  :, , ,  :–, ,  :–, , ,  :,  :, , , ,  :, , ,  , – :–, – :,  :, , , ,  :–, – :,  :–, ,  :, , , , , , , , 

Ephesians :, ,  :–,  :,  :,  :–,  :,  Philippians :,  ,  :,  :,  :,  Colossians :,  :,  :, ,   Thessalonians :,   Timothy :, ,  Hebrews :,  :, ,  James :,  :,  :,   Peter ,   John :, –, 