§1 Approaching Galatians (session 3, part 2)—Paul’s Letter to the Galatians: A Presbyterian Adult Spiritual Formation Series

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

d. J. Louis Martyn, Apocalyptic, and 20^th c. Historical Scholarship

McMaken: Now that we’ve had a chance to look at Luther and Calvin, let’s talk a bit about more recent trends in New Testament interpretation and, especially, how it comes together in J. Louis Martyn’s commentary on Galatians. This will give us a sense of how we interpret Paul today differently than our forebears did during the Reformation. My own way of reading is decisively shaped by the Reformation, and I find many important theological connections there. But there are also some very important corrections that we need to keep in mind that more recent historical scholarship has made to those Reformation approaches. For example, we’ve already tried to be very aware of the supersessionism embedded in how the Reformation read Galatians and how it developed into antisemitism. That is part of this story of more recent critical biblical scholarship.

That story starts with Jesus, as everything does in Christianity. Scholars were focused on understanding and interpreting Jesus before they focused on Paul. Through the 18th and 19th centuries—the Enlightenment period—there was a great deal of research being done on Jesus. It seemed like everybody wrote a book on “The Life of Jesus,” in which they presented their way of understanding Jesus. However, in retrospect, it was all rather boring because they all tended to see Jesus as a moral teacher. They found his significance in the notion that he taught people to be morally upright and civilized. This was a result of the Enlightenment’s focus on rationality and historical awareness (or historical consciousness), which meant that you couldn’t take miracles very seriously. And if you aren’t going to focus on Jesus’s miracles, what’s left to focus on? His teaching. And if you aren’t going to conclude that Jesus is important because he is a divine worker of supernatural miracles, where are you going to find his importance? His being an outstanding moral teacher.

To put an even finer point on it, this idea of Jesus being an outstanding moral teacher dovetailed with the European cultural superiority complex, which they used to justify their colonialism by insisting that they were civilized and everyone else was not. In this environment, Jesus became a teacher of the value system—or, morality—that Europeans equated with their civilized culture, and Christianity became a collection of rituals, practices, and institutions that upheld those values and that civilization. Consequently, Europeans outside of Europe could look at indigenous populations and say that they are uncivilized because they are not Christian and they are not Christian because they are uncivilized. Colonialism and Christianity was all tied up in a big, unfortunate mess.

But there was also a minority report. This began in some important ways with Johannes Weiss (1863–1914) and William Wrede (1859–1906), and culminated in the work of Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965). What set them apart was their sensitivity to the historical context of the Gospels and, especially, the importance of eschatology in getting the interpretations of these texts right. They saw that there’s more to these stories about Jesus than just his teachings. Jesus seems to think that the world is about to end. What's going on with that? These scholars picked up on some of this weirdness, and they didn’t just discount and ignore it as supernatural nonsense. They said: “If we’re going to understand this guy, we probably should think about how he seems to be seeing the world. Maybe that’s going to lead us to some different insights.”

As a result, Schweitzer wrote this hugely influential book called The Quest for the Historical Jesus in 1906.[1] I can’t remember if he uses this metaphor himself or if it is a metaphor that gets used to describe the central argument of his book, but—Schweitzer argues that it’s as though all those people who have been writing “Life of Jesus” books were looking down a deep, dark well to try to see Jesus, but all they see is their own reflection looking back up at them. We bring all these preconceptions and commitments with us when we read the biblical texts that the danger is that we’ll find exactly what we expect to find. Schweitzer thought Jesus was a lot weirder than people were willing to admit because Jesus is from 2000 years ago and people lived in a very different world back then. How was the world different? Well, for starters, they had this eschatological expectation—this end-of-time or end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it expectation. So if we really want to understand Jesus, Schweitzer tells us that we have to understand him as an eschatological prophet. He’s a prophet of the end-of-time. And Schweitzer’s book ends up being so compelling, and so enduringly correct in key ways, that biblical scholarship had to shift and start running along some different tracks.

Now we can fast-forward to another scholar named Ernst Käsemann, who was born in the year Schweitzer’s book was published, 1906. He died in 1998. He was a German scholar and in the 1960’s he was part of the shift to being looking at Paul through some of the same lenses that had been used to study Jesus, and he was especially interested in tracking the eschatological side of Paul. He saw Paul as the beginning of Christianity, which was not a new idea, but Käsemann focused on the experience of Easter and what that did to the early Jesus followers. Paul isn’t part of that, of course, but then he has that subsequent experience of encounter with the risen Jesus. Käsemann’s question is: How does this shift their expectations? And how does understanding this help us understand how they shifted from Jesus preaching that the kingdom of God is going to come at any time to what Paul seems to preach—that the kingdom of God came in Jesus and is going to come again, and completely, very soon? In a theological language, we call this future return of Jesus the parousia.

Let’s think about the dates. The Easter experiences occur around CE 30. Do you remember when we said Galatians is probably written? The early 50s. So they’ve spent 20 years waiting for something that they thought was going to happen pretty quickly. Then there’s another decade of Paul writing letters and it still hasn’t happened. But he still seems to have this expectation that, probably in their lifetimes, it’s going to happen. For instance, you don’t have to worry about having children to produce another generation of Christians. If you’re not married, try to stay that way (1 Cor 7). But Paul and others increasingly had to deal with the embarrassment that came from the delay as the years went by, and people had to try to figure out why things aren’t playing out like they expected. One place we see this in Paul is Romans 9–11, which we discussed before. Paul talks about Israel and about how God is bringing the Gentiles in to be part of God’s people. Then, as soon as enough of the Gentiles come in, the end will come. That’s Paul’s explanation, but there are other explanations that seem to be kicking around as well. You see different explanations in the Deutero-Pauline letters—the ones that say they are from Paul, but we don’t think they really were. Each of those has their own way of explaining why the end hasn’t come. That seems to be the key issue those letters are grappling with.

So, taking a step back: we see that as they moved through the first 100 years or so after Jesus, the Jesus-following communities had this problem of an eschatological delay—a delay at the end of the world—and the need to try to explain and make sense of that jump-started what would become Christian theology. This was Käsemann’s key insight. What we today would call Christian theology comes out of this community trying to make sense of why the consummation of Jesus’s work hasn’t happened yet. And that goes on, down through the years, until it gets to us 2000 years later—and it still hasn’t happened. We’re still here, on a Sunday morning, praying and worshiping Jesus. So, apparently they were successful in coming up with a compelling explanation. But that’s what gets theology off the ground. As Käsemann put it: apocalyptic eschatology is “the mother of all Christian theology.”[2]

And just to pause again over some of these words: we sometimes use the words “eschatology” and “apocalyptic” interchangeably. “Eschatology” reflects a frame of mind that focusses on the end of the world. It’s a mental orientation where you expect the end to come, so that’s where your mind lives. But “apocalyptic” is a specific way of thinking about the end of the world where you think it’s going to happen at any moment and in a very dramatic way. You think it’s going to be an event of conflict, like some big battle. I’ll go into more detail here soon. But apocalyptic is one way of being eschatologically oriented.

Schweitzer develops a way of studying Jesus that pays attention to eschatology and apocalyptic, and Käsemann applies it to Paul. Of course, I’m brushing over a lot of other figures who are important in the story and just hitting the main check-points. All of this fits really well into late Second Temple Judaism. Second Temple Judaism is what we call the period beginning when Jewish folks come back from exile in Babylon toward the end of the 6th century BCE. This is where you read Ezra and Nehemiah in the Hebrew Scriptures / Old Testament. This period ends when the Romans destroy the temple in 70 CE. Why do we call this the “second” temple? Because the temple that Solomon was supposed to have built way back when was destroyed when Jerusalem was conquered and the people sent into exile. But they came back and built a new temple, the “second” temple. “Late” Second Temple Judaism covers the last century or so before the temple was destroyed.

Judaism at that time had a lot of variety in it, but there was also this deep current of apocalyptic expectation. These folks who gave us the Dead Sea Scrolls, which came out of the Qumran community. They thought that this was going to happen at any moment and they wrote texts about the kind of battle that's going to happen when it happens, and about which people would be on which side of the battle. They thought they’d get to help fight and kill all the Romans and other bad people for example. And this apocalyptic expectation is just kind of in the water. So thinking about Jesus and Paul in these terms really fits well into the larger Jewish context at the time.

A scholar named E. P. Sanders provided another watershed moment in scholarship along these lines when he wrote a book called Paul and Palestinian Judaism in 1977.[3] He argues that Paul sees Jesus as a new thing that God is doing to restructure what it means to be part of God's people. So that now, Gentiles can get in on being part of God’s people without having to become Jewish by fully converting. And all of this fits into the broader Jewish eschatological expectations. This helps us understand the early Jesus following Jewish movement as a renewal or revival movement inside Judaism, which makes a lot of sense. Sure, most Jewish folks weren’t convinced, but Jesus-following Jews understood themselves as operating within their broader Jewish commitments. And, as far as we can tell based on what we know about Judaism at that time, they were. They were just restructuring things to make sense of the experience they had of Jesus and the idea that what God is supposed to be doing at the end has started happening already and will soon be completed in Jesus Christ.

Moving forward from Sanders, you have people like J. Christiaan Beker, Martinus C. de Boer, and other people working on understanding Paul through the lens of apocalyptic eschatology. Much of this work is done through the 1980s and the 1990s. J. Louis Martyn’s Galatians commentary published in 1997[4] is, in many ways, a culminating exemplar of that work. Building on the preceding decades of work, Martyn gives us something like the definitive articulation of Paul’s thought in Galatians according to that interpretive approach. I've also been reading a more recent book by Paula Fredriksen called Paul: The Pagan’s Apostle,[5] which is also very good. She stands more firmly in the interpretive line of understanding Paul within his Jewish context, but she is also very attentive to apocalyptic eschatology as part of that context. Her argument is that Paul understood himself as an apocalyptic apostle to the Gentiles—that is, the Pagans. As she puts it: Paul understood himself “as God's prophetic messenger, formed in the womb to carry the good news of impending salvation to the nations, racing on the edge of the end of time.”[6] I think this is a great image. The end of time is crashing down on us and Paul is surfing on the crest of the wave. I really like that.

Now I’d like to spend some time talking more specifically about what “apocalyptic” eschatology is, and I’ll be drawing on MartYn for much of this. The word “apocalypse,” or “apokálypsis” in Greek, means “revelation.” The book of Revelation in the Bible has the more full title of “The Apocalypse of John.” But this is not revelation just in the sense of knowledge. It’s an occurrence. And, in that sense, revelation is an unveiling. You whip the cover off something and you see what's really there. Furthermore, because now you see what’s really there, apocalypse is also a fundamental reorientation of the world. It’s an event that teaches you something about the way the world is that you never understood before, and that helps you see it in a completely different way.

Part of that new way of seeing the world is understanding that there are two “ages.” There’s the current age and there’s the coming age. Furthermore, these two ages are fundamentally incompatible. They don’t fit together and cannot peacefully coexist so their basic relationship is one of conflict. The current age is evil and the coming age is good. The current age is dominated by the powers of sin, death, and the Devil—as Martin Luther might say—and the coming age is one in which God’s rule is uncontested. The current age is about slavery and sin, and the coming age is about freedom and peace. So one of the key questions that Paul asks, as Martyn puts it, is “what time is it” (p. 104)? Which age are we living in? For Paul, the problem people have is they don’t understand what time it is. They can’t read where the hands are pointing on God’s cosmic clock. And at the end of the day, it isn’t the time that people think it is.

What's going to happen at the end? For Paul, it’s already happening. And what’s already happening is God’s invasion of our world. The new eon is breaking in, and will fully and dramatically break in, and there will be a large scale conflict with the old eon and its powers. There's discontinuity, warfare, cosmic struggle between spiritual powers—and earthly powers too. The power of God in the coming age will have a show-down with the power of sin, the power of evil, the present age. It's a war between God and God's forces on the one side, and all the demonic beings and powers on the spiritual side of the world that we currently live in.

As Fredriksen says, “Apocalyptic eschatology corrects history.”[7] “History” is the world that we live in. If you're Jewish in this context, there’s something fundamentally wrong about the world you're living in. Why? Because you're oppressed by Rome. You're not free, and don't feel free to worship your God the way you think you should. Especially if you're out in the countryside with the kinds of Jewish folks that Jesus was hanging out with, the Pharisees, you think the people running the temple are collaborating with Rome and making it all worse. So, there's something fundamentally wrong with the world right now. Apocalyptic eschatology says that, at any moment, God's going to roll back the heavens and show up with an army and fix things. There’s a gap between what is and what should be, but God’s going to show up and close that gap. But the expectation is that this violent conflict and cosmic reckoning could happen any moment. For Paul, the fight is already happening. It started with Jesus. And when Jesus comes back, that's going to be the end of the battle.

To close this section, and to bring things back around and tie together some different friends, I want to talk about a friend of mine named David Congdon. He does really great work on a variety of topics, but he's done a lot of work on interpreting Paul, understanding the apocalyptic interpretation, and tying that into the sort of theological orientation that he and I share. He writes that “Apocalyptic [is] a radicalizing of the Lutheran interpretation.”[8] What does this mean?

Remember that the Lutheran interpretation of Paul emphasizes that salvation is by grace through faith and it's not something you do. Congdon’s point is that there’s a basic continuity between that conviction about how salvation works and understanding Paul’s apocalyptic frame of reference. Why? Because we can't change the clock. We can't wind it forward or back. Only God can do that. God is going to show up at any moment to save us from the disordered, upside-down mess that is the present age and set things right. This is just like how we can't save ourselves in Lutheran accounts of salvation. We can't remove our own sin; we need God to show up and do that for us. There’s a basic similarity between believing that God is about to unroll the scroll of heaven, come back, and fix things on the one hand, and believing that God has forgiven our sins through Jesus on the other. There’s also a difference, of course. On the apocalyptic side, you've got the human predicament writ large across the heavens. It's about cosmic spiritual forces. For Luther, or at least for what becomes the Lutheran tradition, it's something much more like a legal transaction: we've got sin, Jesus has grace, and we need to get things moved around in the accounting book.

The real question is: what if we demythologize Paul's apocalyptic language? What are we left with at an existential level if we take out all those spiritual forces and all the cosmic warfare? How do we understand what it means to be human and to lead a good life as a human being? How do we stay true to the true, authentic being we're supposed to have, the being that God made us to have? Well, you end up with the idea that this is a question that’s too big for any one of us to tackle. Ultimately, we need one another, we need to live in community with one another, because none of us can do everything by and for ourselves. If we try, we just end becoming curved in on ourselves and our lives are distorted even further by self-centeredness. And that’s the way we all are if left to ourselves in this disordered and broken world. If we’re ever going to get straightened out, to have our lives reorientated, we need to encounter the God and Father of Jesus Christ in the midst of our lives together in community—and especially in solidarity and community with the ones with whom Jesus was concerned: those who are imprisoned, oppressed, and exploited by the very real powers that be in our world today.[9] That’s what pulls us out of ourselves and sets us on the path to finding meaning in our lives.

That’s a rough sketch of what an existential approach to the doctrine of salvation (soteriology) is about. You take the basic pattern shared by Paul’s apocalyptic vision and the Lutheran tradition’s way of thinking about salvation, and you start pulling out all the old parts that don’t really make sense to us anymore. We drop the legal or accountant-oriented ideas of ledgers and balances, and we drop the cosmic spiritual forces. But we can maintain their shared continuity, that basic pattern of how we can think about what it means to follow Jesus, and what it means that Jesus is the person who helps us understand what time it is on God's clock.

[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.]