§2 Introduction & Salutation, 1:1-5 (session 5, part 1)—Paul’s Letter to the Galatians: A Presbyterian Adult Spiritual Formation Series

[The series continues and now commences the fifth in-person session. Find the last post here.]

McMaken: Last time we spoke about Nancy Bedford’s work on Galatians. We talked about her way of talking about the structure of Galatians as a chiasm, and I emphasized at the end of our time together a quote from Bedford wherein she sums up her understanding of what Galatians is all about. She said:

“The theological structure of the epistle shows that though the themes, that though themes such as justification do have their place, it is the character of the liberating and loving God manifested as Son, Father, and Spirit as well as the empowering, life-giving relationship of human beings to God that enliven Paul's letter with its themes of goodness, freedom, and justice.”[1]

This is how she helps us shift the center of our attention in reading Galatians away from just the doctrine of salvation, as we Protestants have understood it, to try to focus more on the big picture of what God is up to and how we relate to God throughout the letter.

And, finally, today we get to talk about the text of the letter itself! Hopefully the last month of talking about talking about Galatians will be helpful for us, and not just an elaborate exercise in my stalling.

Now, usually you don’t think there’s much to talk about in the first few verses. Paul likes to include some flowery greetings and such, and it’s easy to skip over those. But I don’t think we get to do that this time. There’s some interesting stuff in these first couple verses, so let’s go ahead and dig in.

§2. Introduction & Salutation (1:1–5)

Paul an apostle—sent neither by human commission nor from human authorities but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead—and all the brothers and sisters with me,

This, according to Bedford, is the introduction and salutation that, in her chiastic structural analysis, balances the final blessing and conclusion at the very end of the book. If you’re looking at the NRSVue version (above), you’ll see a big em-dash after “Paul an apostle.” The NRSVue editors are interpreting everything between that em-dash and the one at the end of the verse as kind of an aside. But, remember, this em-dash isn’t in the Greek text. The Greek text just keeps on running along without any punctuation, like the Greek text always does. So the em-dash is interpretive. But I think it’s helpful because it is a bit of an aside. You’ve got Paul, an apostle. Then you get this description of what Paul means when he calls himself an apostle. That’s what’s inside the em-dash. Then you come back from the em-dash and there’s “all the brothers and sisters with me.” Of course, in the Greek, it’s just adelphoi—it’s just “brethren” or “brothers,” if you’re translating very strictly. But we know that these are mixed groups, so more up-to-date translations have “brothers and sisters.” So, if you take out everything inside the em-dash, the overall structure of the sentence is: “Paul, an apostle, and the brothers and sisters with me, to the churches of Galatia.”

Bedford talks about what it means for Paul to call himself an apostle. I like how she describes apostles. She says that apostles bring “transformative good news.”[2] It changes things in a positive way. Paul is appealing to this tradition that’s already emerging in the church around the idea of good news and apostleship, of being messengers of this transformative good news. He starts off saying, “Hey, I’m an apostle,” but his being an apostle isn’t really the point. He’s inviting his hearers, and his text is inviting us today as well, to remember that message that he preached to them when he was with them—to remember the “transformative good news.” When he says, “Paul an apostle,” he’s calling all of this to their minds. Paul is saying: “Remember, I brought you a message. I’m the one who brought you this transformative good news.” That’s what he wants them to remember. It’s not about him but about that transformative good news.

There is a rhetorical context at work here, too. Paul is arguing with other people who are telling the folks in Galatia different things than what he had told them. So, he’s also making the point to them and to the folks in Galatia that he is an apostle—and he’s not alone. He writes: “and the brothers and sisters with me.” Paul has an entourage. It isn’t just Paul out there by himself. We talked about before at one point and reflected on how Paul is something like an ecclesiastical free agent. He doesn’t have a “mother church” under whose auspices he is working at this point. He’s out doing his own Paul thing. We imagined how his opponents, talking to the Galatians, would use this against him, asking: “Who’s this Paul guy? Who’s he connected to? We’re connected to Jerusalem. We know the apostles in Jerusalem.” This is why Paul emphasizes that he is an apostle and he is not alone. There are others with him as well. The reference to his entourage underscores the weight of Paul’s authority and message. Calvin, in his commentary, brings that out especially well, I think: “Paul, an apostle, and the brothers and sisters with me.”

Participant: You don't think that he was still being sent out by the Church of Antioch?

McMaken: No. He had been for a long time. But we think that this interaction with Galatians occurs after his separation from Antioch. There’s one point where he and Barnabas part ways and Paul breaks his ties so that he’s not “working for Antioch” anymore, as it were. He’s doing his own thing. And this is where the em-dash becomes important!

—sent neither by human commission nor from human authorities but through Jesus Christ and God the Father

Calvin underscores here that Paul is making the point that his authority, his message, his apostleship, does not depend on human agency.[3] And Calvin is especially concerned with connecting the dots between what he’s reading here and what we read in the book of Acts. At some point along the way, we talked about how Acts is written by a completely different author—not Paul. We believe the author was Luke, the same author of the Gospel of Luke. And the book of Acts comes several decades after the letter to the Galatians. We have every reason to think that the story about Paul told in Acts cleans things up a little bit to make things sound a little more harmonious. For example: in Acts, whenever Paul shows up and talks to the other apostles, it all sounds wonderful and happy, and they all agree. But, as those of us who have ever read the letter to the Galatians before, Paul is going to describe some heated confrontations that he has with Peter. The point is that we can’t assume that the book of Acts gives us good biographical information on Paul. We have to think carefully about that. But Calvin wants to make them align. He wants to come up with an explanation for how the Galatians story of Paul fits with the story in Acts.

So, Calvin talks about Paul and Barnabas being commissioned by the church at Antioch in Acts 23 as the origin of Paul’s call. He notes, in that passage in Acts, that the Holy Spirit is the one who sends Paul and Barnabas so that Paul’s vocation as an apostles does not depend on a “human commission” or “human authorities.” It depends on the Holy Spirit. This is Acts 13:2-3:

“While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, ‘Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.’ Then after fasting and praying they laid their hands on them and sent them off.”[4]

It would seem that Luke, when writing Acts, might have gotten something right about how Paul understood his calling. Paul thought of himself as having been sent as an apostle directly by God and not by humans. He doesn’t depend on human authority because he’s sent directly through Jesus. Implicitly, Paul is saying that these other teachers that the Galatians have been listening to, who make a big deal out of their human commission and human authority, don’t deserve to be taken seriously.

Both Calvin and Luther really focus on these questions of commission and authority because they both think that people’s calling by God to ministry needs to be lawful, orderly, and “normal.” When they read the section from Paul about not receiving his call by human commission or human authority, they get a little bit nervous. They’re dealing with these other radical Protestants—and they had different names for them: some called them radicals, or spiritualists, or sectarians—who claimed they received direct communication and revelation from the Holy Spirit. They would say, “God told me that we should do X, Y, and Z.” Calvin and Luther, both in their places, are saying: “Wait a minute. Nobody has validated any of what you’re saying. You’re just saying whatever you want to say. You’re not responsible to any authorities. Nobody’s called you. Nobody’s commissioned you.”

Luther and Calvin are concerned about law and order, and they’re worried about people who might say: “Paul isn’t called by human authority. Why should we have to be called by human authority?” Calvin’s solution is to argue that being an apostle is “the highest rank” in the church.[5] So, if you’re the highest rank in the church, it doesn’t make much sense to appeal to other human authorities to set up that highest rank. Somehow, that highest rank needs to come directly from God, and that requires direct divine agency. That makes it possible for Calvin to say that Paul’s story is about being an apostle and not about the calling of your average pastor. For both Calvin and Luther, in different ways, normal ministerial calling comes through the church or the government authorities.

Of course, this is interesting to reflect on in our context for completely different reasons, especially since in the United States we don’t have government authorities involved in calling pastors, regulating ministerial training, etc. Germany still does, and other countries do, but we do not and have not for a very long time. Luther says:

“When the prince or some other magistrate calls me…I can boast…that I have been called by the command of God through the voice of a man; for the command of God comes through the mouth of the prince, and this is a genuine call.”[6]

I don’t know about you all, but that bothers me a little bit—the idea that we’re going to identify a hereditary, political, aristocratic kind of structure and say that it’s only through that structure that you get legitimate calling from God to be ministers of word and sacrament.

Calvin does it a little bit differently because he’s in a city rather than a principality. They don’t have to report to a hereditary ruler. They have their own ways of organizing themselves. In Geneva, that organization was a little complicated. There was the suffrage of all adult males of certain property. There was a council of 200 that they elected. There was like a council of 40 that handled more legislative things. There was an even smaller council than that sitting at the top, who handled more Department of State kind of stuff. And then there were a couple Syndics at the top who were the executive officers of the government. They had this multivalent representative structure to run their city, and Calvin thinks that you get lawful and orderly calling of ministers through this more representative structure.

This is like our church, and we just did this last week. We had a big meeting where a committee of elders and other church members proposed new candidates to us for leadership in the church. We could make other proposals from the floor if we wanted to. We had a whole nominating process, but the candidates that were presented to us were vetted in various ways by the existing leadership. Then we all had the opportunity to affirm whether we agree that these folks should have these roles in our community. That’s how Calvin thought it should happen. In his context, the church elders were generally members of those different councils. They were community leaders in both political and spiritual matters. They would review, investigate, interrogate, and vet potential new pastors and leaders. Then they would bring them to the congregation to talk about concerns or affirmations. It seems to be a little more democratic on Calvin’s side, even though the city government was still involved.

That makes more sense to me than Luther’s reliance on a prince. But both Luther and Calvin are worried about the idea that anybody can come along and say “God told me to do X” or “God gave me the message of X.” Folks were doing that, and Luther and Calvin disagreed with what they were saying. But because Paul says something like that, both Luther and Calvin had to come up with explanations for why it’s okay for Paul and not for anybody else.

who raised him from the dead—

This is an interesting little aside. It’s just a few words. Calvin says that Paul is referring to Jesus’s resurrection here as a way of countering arguments that his opponents supposedly we’re making, saying that Paul’s authority was less than the other apostles—apostles that these other folks have come from in Jerusalem—because Paul was not associated with Jesus during Jesus’s lifetime.[7] Paul didn’t know Jesus when Jesus was alive and walking around. The other ones did. You can imagine these folks coming from Jerusalem and saying: “What’s Paul got to do with anything? He didn’t even know Jesus! The people who we’ve come from did. Who are you going to believe?” To counter that, Paul says: “God raised Jesus from the dead. That wasn’t the end of the story.” It isn’t just a question of people who knew Jesus before he died because Jesus is still alive in an important way. So, that’s how this factors into the conflict between Paul and Paul’s opponents in Galatians. It’s part of the argument in this letter over who has the better credentials.

The implicit suggestion, which we get more explicitly later in the chapter, is that Paul encountered the resurrected Christ—and that this is just as good or better, in Paul’s mind, than having known Jesus when Jesus was alive and walking around. He throws in this question of who raised Jesus from the dead, right at the beginning, signaling where he’s going to go with some of this. Paul is making the point that he isn’t derivative and that his authority isn’t derivative. The other teachers that are there from the apostles in Jerusalem have their authority from those other apostles. They’re derivative. Paul’s saying: “I encountered the risen Christ. I’m not derivative.”

[This is an edited transcript from an adult spiritual formation group that met at St. Charles Presbyterian Church in St. Charles, Missouri. It was transcribed and edited with the help of a student worker at Lindenwood University who wishes to remain anonymous, but who was also a big help. Click here to find an index of the full series.]