§1 Approaching Galatians (session 4, part 2)—Paul’s Letter to the Galatians: A Presbyterian Adult Spiritual Formation Series

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

We saw, when we were talking about Luther, that Galatians is all about freedom of conscience. Calvin reads it very much the same way but focuses on the question of culture. For Calvin, you can't impose one culture on another culture. Now, unfortunately, there’s a tradition of interpretation within Protestant readings of Galatians that focuses on the idea of freedom and thinks about it in terms of freedom from the law. It draws a contrast with Judaism where Judaism is supposed to be characterized by servitude to the law and Paul’s vision of Christianity in Galatians is supposed to be characterized by freedom from the law and from Judaism. I think we’re all on the same page at this point about that way of framing things being problematic. But that doesn’t mean Galatians isn’t about freedom. I think it's certainly true that Paul wants to focus on the freedom of Gentile Jesus-followers to be precisely that, Gentile Jesus-followers.

Bedford also lifts up this idea of freedom in Galatians and she identifies two aspects of freed. By doing this, Bedford makes an important point that we as Americans really need to hear because we love freedom. We talk about it a lot. It's in all our founding documents. It's in all our political rhetoric. It's on all the flags that people attach to their pickup trucks here in Missouri. But there are two ways you can talk about freedom. You can talk about being free from things. This is freedom as a lack of constraint. But you can also talk about being free for things. This way of thinking about freedom doesn’t think freedom is a good in and of itself. Instead, it thinks that freedom is only as good as what you use it to accomplish. In other words, there are right ways to be free and there are wrong ways to be free. True freedom is not just the lack of constraint. True freedom is the ability to live a certain kind of life in service to a particular goal. So when we talk about freedom, or hear other people talk about freedom, we have to think about what that freedom is from or for.

This is exactly what Bedford highlights. She argues that Galatians teaches us about freedom in the sense of having freedom for life together in service of God and neighbor, which is made possible in important ways because we have freedom from cultural imperialism. And this is where she reaches back to Calvin’s point about culture: people shouldn’t impose their culture on other people, and we should not act as though our culture is superior to other people’s culture. As Bedford says, “Any particular culture is a two-edged sword. It’s both liberating and oppressive.”[1]

Every culture has liberating aspects and every culture has oppressive aspects. A perfect culture that should reign in all times and places does not, has not, and will never exist. And the same is true within Christianity. There is no one perfect form of Christianity to which everyone in all times and places should adhere. This goes against some very popular talking points in our society today, however. We often hear people talk about the “biblical worldview” and what it does or does not include. Have we heard this language? People tell us that we should have a “biblical” view of X or a “biblical” view of Y. But sticking “biblical” on the front of a piece of culture doesn’t change things. Our Bible is full of different cultural snapshots from lots of different times and places, and all of them are two-edged swords. All of them have liberating and oppressive aspects.

I personally think it's hilarious whenever anybody says we should have a “biblical” view of marriage, for example. Next time you’re reading your Bible, pay attention to how people marry and relate to each other. Think about Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar, or about people like David and Solomon who had many wives apiece. Or think about the children of Adam and Eve populating the earth, or Isaac having his dad’s servant go to a foreign country to bring him back someone to marry sight unseen. There're all kinds of different versions of marriage that are “biblical,” and that highlights the absurdity of the idea that there is such a thing as a “biblical” view of marriage. The same things is true with reference to “biblical manhood” and “biblical womanhood.” Have you heard that kind of language? The idea here is that the Bible gives you specific roles based on your gender. But, again, there are a wide variety of different constructions you can make out of this. There is no single version of what it means to be a man or a woman in the biblical texts. The Bible possesses—or maybe we should say that it is possessed by—many different cultural snapshots, so there is no one “biblical” view of just about anything. We should call the cultures or worldviews of the Bible “Legion,” for they are many.[2]

Not that there’s anything wrong with that! The authors of the biblical texts wrote from their time and place, with all the prejudices, blind spots, and oppressive aspects of their time and place along with any liberating ones. But the lesson of Galatians, as Bedford teaches us, is that we have freedom from cultural imperialism. We don't have to adopt a particular culture that somebody tells us is best, no matter where they think they’re getting it from, because no culture is perfect. Instead, we need to figure out the complicated interaction between liberating and oppression in every single time and place where the gospel creates a hearing for itself—including our own time and place today. To bring this back to Galatians, this is how Bedford summarizes Paul’s position:

“It is not necessary for non-Jews to become Jews in order to be Christians [Jesus followers], though Christians accept the Hebrew Bible as Scripture and respect the faith of Jesus; it is also not necessary for Jews to cease being Jews if they do follow Jesus any more than Paul gave up his Jewish faith and identity.”[3]

In other words, Gentiles and Jews can have different ways of being Jesus-followers.

Once she makes this point, Bedford reflects further on our freedom from cultural imperialism and what that means for us today especially if we think globally. In particular, she thinks about what it means for the global south and talks about all the ways, both implicit and explicit, that we take our Northern and Western cultural ideals—our Eurocentric and American-centric cultural ideals—and force them on other places throughout the world. Think about the fact that you can go to McDonald's almost anywhere in the world. Think about the way missions happened in the past with missionaries from America or Europe going to these other countries and trying to give them the gospel. And, of course, conveniently, this gospel seemed to also contain instructions about how to wear certain clothes as well as all the gender-based roles that we know from our own history. All of that was somehow a package deal. Missionary activity in the past, and still too often today, includes the idea that when you convert people to Christianity, you're also giving them civilization—civilization as Europe and the United States has defined it.

Bedford wants us to see that, those of us in the global North, and especially in the West, need to give the global South the freedom to develop their own ways of following Jesus without expecting that they're going to do it the same way that we've done it. It is impossible to make this point too strongly. And the same pattern of thinking also applies to generational differences within the Christian community. Our children don't have to be Christians the same way that we have been, the same way that our parents and our grandparents have been, and so on. Following Jesus, and how we come together as a community of Jesus-followers, is going to look different because culture is constantly shifting and changing, and there is no perfect culture. They all have oppressive and liberating aspects. This can apply to music, for example. What kind of music do we have in church? With what kind of instruments?

Participant (in jest): I'm sorry. You've gone too far.

McMaken: I'll go farther than that! For instance, what language do we use? As Protestants, we've always stood firm on the idea of using the vernacular language, the language that people actually use in day-to-day life, which is why we read the Bible in a translation other than Latin—which is itself also a translation. This is why our church services are not in Latin. The Roman Catholic church didn’t move away from Latin and to the vernacular language for biblical translation and their liturgy, their worship services, until the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.

And then, to push the language question further: what about slang? Dialect, slang, more or less “formal” uses of our language—all that is a question of what it means to use vernacular language as well. What if our pastor got up into the pulpit and used phrases that the kids use these days, like “bet,” “no cap,” or “rizz”? This probably isn’t language that many of us in this room have encountered, although some of us who try to teach high school and college students may have some familiarity. So there is an aspect of generational difference tied up with the use of language in our communities as well. What language do we speak? Does it bother us to hear younger people speaking like this? Does it bother us to hear this kind of language in church?

Participant: Our pastor does speak like that occasionally.

McMaken: Yes, occasionally.

Participant: I know the first time I heard him, I though “oh.”

McMaken: Exactly! But even his vernacular is a couple decades out of date.

Participant: I was more out of date than that.

McMaken (playfully): No comment!

Participant: Which introduces interesting questions about how we can all be part of the spiritual community together and talk to each other.

McMaken: Yes, it does—that’s exactly right! And there are generational differences here, too, in terms of expectations about the role of institutions. We all kind of got put through the ringer on this one by COVID-19. We couldn't attend church and gather together in the same way. Younger generations don't have the same reflexes about institutions. They don’t necessarily assume that institutions are probably good things, and they don’t necessarily assume that they owe anything to an institution.

For example, some of us have it deeply ingrained in us that you show up to church every week. That reflex just isn’t there in the same way for younger generations. They may come in and out to different activities here or there but never consistently show up for worship services on Sundays. And then there are folks who show up at a bar once a week to talk about religion while having a beer. That's common these days. I can neither confirm nor deny that I've done that.

Participant: You’re safe here.

McMaken: There are many different ways that folks are expressing their interest in spiritual things, or bringing their faith to expression in the world, that are outside of what looks like normal Christianity or identifiable Christian institutions to previous generations. But this is an example of being free from cultural imperialism. We don’t have to replicate the same institutions and ways of doing things generation after generation. Just like culture, every institution can be liberating and oppressive—often at the same time but in different ways for different people.

What we’re really talking about here is finding ways to be faithful Jesus-followers without dominating and oppressing others. This is about faithfulness that does not feel like it needs to control. It is faithfulness that is free from imposing one cultural picture on another. And in that sense, it is faithfulness without colonialism and faithfulness beyond imperial power—whether that power is explicit, like Rome or the British Empire, or whether it is more implicit and economically driven, like the American Empire.

The important question is: how can we be faithful as Christians in our own place and time while also working to keep ourselves and others free from cultural imperialism? That's something Bedford wants us to think about as we go through Galatians. It isn’t just a question of being free from; it is also being free for something. As Christians we are free for a new way of life beyond domination and cultural imperialism. Or, as Bedford puts it, we are free “to develop faithful communities in a particular context.”[4] It doesn’t matter what time and place we're in, or what the prevailing cultural expectations, norms, and conditions are. We are free to find a way to be faithful there. And we don't have to be faithful there in the way that we would be faithful somewhere else. We are free to find a way to be a faithful community in a particular context.

Along these same lines in terms of what we are free for, Bedford also says that “we are free to love and to be transformed evermore into God's image and likeness.”[5] So if we ask: what's it mean to be a faithful community of Jesus-followers? Bedford answers by saying that it means loving and being transformed ever more into God's image and likeness. The trick is figuring out what shape that should take in a particular context. God's image and likeness is going to come to expression differently in different communities in different times and places. Maybe in the 1970s in the United States it comes out looking, at least in part, like bell-bottom jeans. Maybe in the 1950s, it involves heavy-rimmed glasses and a crew cuts. Maybe now, it’s somewhere on Instagram or TikTok. The key thing is that we are free to love and to be transformed evermore into God's image and likeness.

Bedford helps us further by putting a little more flesh on things. Our freedom as Jesus-followers is for pursuing “the embedded, diverse, and collaborative quality of life in community central to the Christian faith.”[6] For Bedford, as she reads Galatians, the core of the Christian life is this embedded, diverse and collaborative communal life. Living that kind of communal life is what it means to love and be transformed increasingly into God’s image and likeness as a faithful community in a particular context.

Participant: What does she mean by “embedded”?

McMaken: That's her way of emphasizing that all this takes place within a particular context. We aren’t trying to bring things from other times and places and artificially implant them here, but we’re working together to figure out how to be faithful as a community of people in our particular time and place.

Participant: Paul cringed at his opponents that followed him around. Maybe that’s what he was doing.

McMaken: Yeah, in his mind that’s exactly what he was doing. And the problem with his opponents is that they were telling the Gentile Jesus-followers that they had act like Jewish Jesus-followers.

All this has taken me longer than I expected but we have one more thing to talk about before getting to the text of Galatians itself, and that’s the chiasm. This is Bedford’s way of thinking through the structure of Paul’s letter to the Galatians and how she breaks it up into sections. Remember, chapters and verses are not in the Greek text—all that was added later just to give folks a handy way of referring to different parts of it. It’s all artificial and it’s all an act of interpretation, so we can disagree with it and Bedford does.

This is Bedford’s outline of how the logic or argument of Galatians goes.[7] She thinks you have an “Introduction and Salutation” in the first five verses. Then she describes the next chunk, which is 1:6–2:21, as “The Gospel Is Truly Good News.” Then “Walking by Faith in Freedom,” which is most of Chapter 3. Then “Equality in Christ” is 3:28–4:7. Then the themes start repeating or recapitulating themselves and it is “Walking by Faith in Freedom” again. It's the same theme but now things have shifted because we've turned the corner, as it were. So then, again, it’s “The Gospel Is Truly Good News” before “Final Blessing and Conclusion.” If we zoom in on the “Equality in Christ” section, which is the hinge of the whole structure as it were, Bedford breaks it down further because she sees a trinitarian structure there. You can see it broken out on the other side: “Equality in Christ” is Galatians 3:28. Remember, we talked about that verse and how important it is. Bedford identifies it with the Son. “Adoption as God's Children” she identifies with the Father, and “The Spirit of the Son” relates to the Holy Spirit. Bedford finds this emergent trinitarian structure at the heart of Paul's letter to the Galatians. The doctrine of the Trinity, as we know it today, was not up and running by any stretch of the imagination when Paul wrote his letter. That took another 300 years. But Bedford sees the seeds of it here in Galatians in an incognito way. These are the ideas that will lead in the direction of the doctrine of the Trinity in terms of how the dynamic of the gospel works and the structure of Son, Father, and Holy Spirit.

A “chi” is the Greek letter X. If you look at the shape on the chiasm chart, it looks like the left side of an X. So a chiasm is a literary structure that roughly follows the shape of the letter when you chart it out, with both ends working as mirror images moving in and out from a central hinge point. There is a repeating, revisiting, or recapitalization of themes and how they line up on each side of the hinge. That's a chiastic structure. Practically speaking with reference to Galatians, identifying this structure helps us see how that section of 3:28–4:7 is at the core of what Paul is trying to communicate. Bedford wants us to see the spotlight shining on that section because she thinks it’s the interpretive key for understanding the whole thing.

Bedford works through her interpretation in terms of these sections as she's laid them out here, and I'm going to follow her structure—rather than Luther, or Calvin’s, or coming up with my own—because I think what she’s done here is very compelling.

Participant: I wonder how conscious Paul was when he was writing this pattern. I wonder if he thought about this as he sat down to write it. Or if he just sat down, knowing what his beef was and what he wanted to say, and it just turned out that it followed this structure.

McMaken: I happen to know that you write letters of recommendation for students. When you write a letter of recommendation, do you think about the structure?

Participant: Yeah.

McMaken: Do you sit down and structure it? Do you start by telling them how you know this person? Then tell them about some of the great work that they did? Then tell them why they're going to succeed in the program? Then say, “I recommend them” and here's my name?

Participant: No. That's kind of intuitive because I write those letters all the time.

McMaken: Exactly. Remember, Paul is highly educated. He's not just educated in the sense of being a Pharisee. He's also a Roman citizen. He's educated in the rhetoric of the time. He's studied how to do this stuff. He has these tools at his disposal and he's able to reach for the rhetorical device he wants to use to make his point, whether consciously or unconsciously. Did he sit down and chart it out? Probably not. But it's a form that he had available to him, and he would have known.

Participant: With the Trinity, really there’s no explanation of it anywhere in the Bible?

McMaken: Correct. The doctrine of the Trinity, as we know it, is not in the Bible. There are what we can call proto-trinitarian statements. For instance, at the end of 2nd Corinthians, it says: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.”[8] This is a proto-trinitarian statement. Why “trinitarian”? Because you have “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit.” There seems a be a three-fold structure to God’s being and action here. Why “proto”? To give the most straightforward example: because it says “God” rather than “Father.” On the basis of this verse, you could still argue that there's a hierarchy between God on one side and whatever Jesus and the Holy Spirit are up to on the other side. But there’s no hierarchy like that in the doctrine of the Trinity as it came to be articulated later. So, in the New Testament you get statements like this that point in the direction of the logic that later gets developed into the doctrine of the Trinity. But there's no full-blown doctrine of the Trinity in the New Testament.

Participant: Was Paul one of the first to write down this sort of thing?

McMaken: He's one of the first writers in the New Testament, full stop.

There’s one last point about Bedford’s structure that I don’t want to forget. She has this to say about the structure she has identified and how it relates to some previous interpretations: “The theological structure of the epistle shows 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.”[9] She's trying to shift our perspective as readers of Galatians. Saying that Galatians is all about justification by grace through faith is great and all, and may have been really important in Luther’s day, but Bedford wants us to see that there’s a lot more to it. Galatians is about how God enters into liberating, empowering, and life-giving relationship with us. We'll get into that more as we go along.

[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.]