§1 Approaching Galatians (session 1, part 1)—Paul’s Letter to the Galatians: A Presbyterian Adult Spiritual Formation Series
§1. Approaching
Galatians
1. Preamble
McMaken: Good morning, everybody
Crowd: Good morning
McMaken: Thanks for making it out
even though there were some pieces of ice or something falling from the
sky earlier. Glad you made it safely. We’re going to talk together about Galatians
for a while. As y’all know, I come and share once a year around this time, and
for different lengths of time. And unlike previous years, we’re going to be
able to spend a longer period of time together. So I thought, what’s something
that we could talk about that would definitely take
us that long?
2. Sources
McMaken: I've got one thing to pass
out and if you stick this in your purse or in your Bible or something just so
that you have it, in future, it might come in handy. I basically took a picture
of two pages out of a commentary to get us a map of Asia Minor and I stitched
them together and that’s what's on top. And, on the bottom, is an outline of
the book of Galatians that Nancy Bedford put together. We’ll talk about that a little
bit in a coming week and what that means for how we understand the book.
Before we
get going, here are some of books that I'm reading as I work on this. I showed
you Bedford.[1] Up
at Lindenwood, when there's time, we try to do a theology reading group with a number
of folks who come from around the campus and around the community, and this is
one of the books that we read one semester. The author was the doctoral
supervisor of one of the pastors in town here and she spoke very highly of it.
It’s a very good book on Galatians. Since I had read it, when I was thinking of
Galatians, I knew it was a good book and decided to use it as my basic frame of
reference. So, as we’re going through, I’m following her outline and her way of
breaking up the text into pieces. She’ll be an important part of the conversation
for me and also, as I translate it, for all of us.
Also, I can't do much without talking about Luther and Calvin.
These are their commentaries. Luther came first, but you all know I love Calvin.
This is most of Luther's lectures on Galatians from 1535.[2]
There’s another part volume that I’ll get out if we get far enough. He did
another lecture cycle on it in 1519. I’ll talk about that more later. This is Calvin’s
set of commentaries on Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians 1 & 2 Thessalonians,
1 & 2 Timothy, Titus, and Philemon.[3]
So, you can see the relative size. Calvin's a lot more concise and to the point
than Luther.
And then this is another commentary. This is a modern commentary published in 1997. The author is J. Louis Martyn.[4] I’ll talk more about all of these things as we get in, probably next week. We’ll see how it goes. But, just in the interest of show and tell, we can pass these around as folks want to flip through.
3. Opening Questions
McMaken: I want to start by asking
some questions. How many of us have read Galatians before at all? Like, you’ve
opened your Bible the book of Galatians at some point. Okay, we’ve got a decent
number of people who must’ve passed through Galatians. Anybody ever spend more
time with it than that? Any other series of, you know, adult studies that
you’ve done or sermon series that you’ve heard on the book of Galatians?
Participant: Probably at one point. The question
is how much I remember.
McMaken: Well, they tell us in teaching,
it’s always helpful to gage the preunderstanding of your folks. That helps us
figure out how to frame things and what level to pitch things at. So, what I’m
getting is that we haven’t had a lot of intensive experience with the book of Galatians.
Alright. Has anybody ever read it in one sitting? Just sit down and read the
whole book?
Participant: Probably in high school. I read
the whole Bible. I probably did read it, all at once.
McMaken: What about any of the other
Pauline epistles? It’s really interesting because,
I don’t often do it and I did it again a couple weeks ago for this. You get a
very different perspective when you say, okay, I’m just going to sit down and
read Paul’s letter to the Galatians. Right? And just read the whole thing.
Because, so often, when we read Paul’s letters, we’re doing it for a reason. We
are reading them because it’s part of our devotions.
We’re reading them spiritually and devotionally. Or we’re hearing snippets of
it in the service when the text come up in the lectionary or when its being
preached. Or maybe we’re thinking about a particular topic that ties in, so we’re
reading a few verses here and there. But if you sit down and read the whole
thing, you just get this bigger picture, and it feels like it's actually a letter. Go figure, right? Rather than
feeling like, oh its some biblical book. Well, it’s a letter. This guy wrote a letter.
And he was kinds ticked off at the time, if we’re being honest. And a lot of that
just starts coming through in a very new way.
So, I would definitely
encourage you to sit down and read it in one sitting. It’s not that long. It’ll
take a half hour, hour maybe, and you’ll have a much different perspective on
it. I’m personally going to try and do that a few times as we go through, just to
keep that kind of perspective, and I think that could be an interesting
practice.
Okay. So, we
have a little bit of experience reading the book of Galatians, in the past. Do
we have any kind of preconceptions about the book of Galatians? What comes to
mind when you think: Paul's letter to the Galatians? Do we have any ideas there?
Do we have any thoughts, any connections?
Participant: Like all things that Paul wrote, to me personally, he’s very verbose. He loves
his words.
McMaken: You should read him in Greek!
I think there’s maybe 5 sentences in the whole letter. No, it’s not that bad.
But, he has really long Greek sentences. You can imagine his secretary taking
it down while he’s talking. He’s just talking and talking nonstop. So, it’s
understandable if we don’t like his style of writing.
Participant: I always think that Paul, with
the exception of Philippians, he was usually ticked off. So, when I'm opening a
Pauline letter, I usually just try to remember, what was he ticked off abut
again with this one?
McMaken: Maybe not Romans. But, yeah,
he’s always writing for a reason, right? And sometimes he’s fairly agitated. So, do we have any sense of what the
reason in Galatians is? How would we articulate that? No?
Alright, so,
we don’t have a lot of preconceptions about Galatians. That works for me because
I can give you some to work with moving forward because there are some kicking around
out there and so I want to flag a few of those because that'll give us a sense of
the kind of topics we’ll be getting into. But also, if you ever encounter other
people talking about it, you might have a map to frame things and locate
things.
Obviously, I
showed you the Luther commentary, and I'll say more about this, but the book of
Galatians was very important at the time of the Reformation, and it was very
important for Luther developing his doctrine of justification—his understanding
of salvation. So, theologically speaking, it played a very key role there for
us as Protestants. That’s really important.
Also, it’s
an important text on the subject of how Judaism and
Christianity relate to one another because Paul talks a lot about the law. Paul
talks a lot about whether it’s necessary to observe the law in the Jewish
sense. And so, down through the years, beginning pretty
early, and even as soon as it was received by the Galatians, it became a touchstone
for how to think though those things. It has been used in damaging ways. There’s
a position that we call supersessionism. It’s not just about having a really great group of elders at your local Presbyterian
church.
Supersessionism
is the idea that Gentile Jesus followers—which I’m pretty sure is all of us in
the room—replaced the Jewish people as God’s chosen people so that, with the advent
of Jesus, Jews are no longer God’s chosen people but we Gentile Jesus
followers, “Christians,” are. And I think we all know enough about 20th century history to understand how that could and has produced some very
negative consequences. The repercussions of those kinds of ideas are still
playing out in global politics, and it seems to have come around again more
recently in local and national politics within the United States. The book of Galatians
has been a text that’s central to all of that, so it’s important to understand
the text well so that we don’t end up inadvertently hurting people.
There’s also
the subject of what we call apocalyptic. That’s where the J. Louis Martyn’s commentary
comes in, and I’ll talk about this more. Apocalyptic is a particular kind of
eschatology, and now I’m using the fancy theology works—the multisyllabic words.
Eschatology is when you’re talking about the “end” of things. So any of the speculations
about the end times and the rapture and all of this
kind of stuff, or thinking about Jesus as the last thing of God—like, the “end”
as the “goal” and not thinking chronologically—all of this falls under this
idea of eschatology. Apocalyptic comes from the Greek word apokálupsis
and it’s a particular way of thinking about the end things. I’ll get into a lot
more details but it’s a very conflict-based way of thinking about it. It
basically involves viewing the world through a framework of cosmic spiritual
warfare. Martyn stands in a tradition that tries to understand the New
Testament in those kinds of terms because it seems like it was very much part
of Jesus’ world, and part of Paul’s world. We’ll get more into the details of some
of that but Galatians is an important book for that.
And then,
finally, I imagine that you’ve encountered some of the most famous passages in
Galatians. One of those is 2:19-20. Tell me if you recognize this when I read
it:
“For
through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been
crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who
lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the
Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
Sound familiar? That’s a touchstone
for kind of the Reformation-doctrine-of-justification interpretation of
Galatians. But then 3:28. Well, we’ll start with 27. Tell me if you recognize
this:
“As
many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There
is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer
male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”
Does that sound familiar, too? That’s a very
important text for feminism and feminist reading in the New Testament and of
Paul, and for trying to understand all the debates that surrounded whether
women should be involved in ministry, and to what extent, and so on. I appreciate
how this passage bases everything on Baptism. There’s a sense in which in
the Christian community, Baptism is the basic ordination. Everybody’s baptized
and part of being baptized means bearing witness to Christ, proclaiming Christ,
talking about Christ. For everyone in the Christian community, it’s being
baptized and being in Christ Jesus that is the fundamental point.
[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.]
[1] Nancy Elizabeth Bedford, Galatians,
Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible (Louisville: Westminster John
Knox, 2016).
[2] Jaroslav Pelikan, ed., Luther’s
Works, Volume 26: Lectures on Galatians 1535, Chapters 1–4 (Saint Louis:
Concordia Publishing House, 1963).
[3] John Calvin, “Commentaries on the
Epistle of Paul to the Galatians,” in Commentaries on the Epistles of Paul
to the Galatians and Ephesians, William Pringle, trans. (Grand Rapids:
Baker Books, 2003).
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