§2. Introduction & Salutation, 1:1-5 (session 5, part 2)—Paul’s Letter to the Galatians: A Presbyterian Adult Spiritual Formation Series
[The
series continues and now concludes the fifth in-person session. Find the last post here.]
Continuing comment on Galatians 1:1—“who raised him from the dead.”
Luther
tackles this phrase about resurrection, and—interestingly—he wants to interpret
what Paul says here about resurrection from the dead as a gloss on God’s righteousness.[1] He thinks that Paul is talking
about the righteousness of God in that Christ rose to justify and save us,
underscoring that we’re justified by Christ's righteousness and not by anything
we do. This is passive righteousness. For Luther, our justification happens in
the resurrection because we see there the righteousness of God that saves us.
For Luther, we’re going to be resurrected with Christ
literally in the last days. More recently, Rudolph Bultmann reframed things to
suggest that we’re resurrected from the dead spiritually whenever any of us
come to faith. We participate in Christ’s resurrection as we are resurrected in
faith. You can then apply this to Easter by talking about how Jesus is resurrected
into our hearts. This line of thinking takes that next step from Luther to
think about how it is that the righteousness of God that occurs in Christ’s
resurrection connects with us in our lives today.
Bedford points out that this is the only mention of
the resurrection in all of Galatians.[2] This is the sort of thing
you notice only when you stop and think about it. But this is odd because Paul
makes such a big deal about the resurrection in 1st Corinthians,
like when he says in 15:17—“If Christ has not been raised, your faith is
futile, and you are still in your sins.” Paul then gives this whole explanation
about the resurrection and the centrality of the resurrection for what it is
that he thinks God is up to in Jesus. Reading that in 1st
Corinthians, you get the idea that the resurrection
is really important to him. But he only mentions it
once in Galatians. It seems a little odd that it wouldn’t play a larger role.
Bedford says that the presence of resurrection here at the start of the letter underscores
the framework that Paul brings to understanding the meaningfulness of Jesus.
This is everything we've talked about already with apocalyptic. The idea that
there’s a cosmic war going on between spiritual forces and that somehow Jesus
is the beginning of God’s victory in this cosmic battle—and, more specifically,
the Christ’s resurrection is the flashpoint.
So, even if Paul is not going to spend a lot of time
talking about resurrection, he still throws this in to remind people about the
big picture that he would have explained to them very thoroughly when he was with
them. He’s saying: “Remember the resurrection! That's the context of everything
we’re up to here—this apocalyptic change that’s happened, this changing of the
ages.” We’ll see some of that language coming in in a few verses as well. Paul
wants to make sure they know what time it is, in the cosmic grand scheme of
things, so that they can understand what it means to live in this time and what
God needs from us in this time. Specifically, the question is whether God needs
Gentiles to become Jews in this time or whether they need to stay Gentiles. Paul
throws the resurrection in here to gesture toward that framework, that bigger
picture informing the kinds of arguments he’s going to be make.
Paul’s teaching emphasizes that the resurrection is
God’s victory, or the beginning of God’s victory over the forces, as Luther
would put it, of sin, death, and the devil. That’s a favorite phrase of
Luther’s. The resurrection is a victory over death and all its forces, which is
the root of everything that oppresses life and keeps life from flourishing and
human beings from living in God’s peace—which is the hugely robust concept in
the Jewish tradition of shalom. This is not just peace as an absence of
conflict but peace as the flourishing of life. Death, and all the forces
associated with the evil side in this apocalyptic imagery, gets in the way of that
peace. By mentioning it here, even though he’s not going to talk about it a
lot, perhaps Paul is saying, “look, this is the big picture, but I’m not going
to focus on explaining to you what the gospel is.” Paul’s already done that.
They’ve already accepted it. This isn’t like his letter to the Romans where he’s
writing to people he hasn’t talked to yet and so he
needs to explain what he thinks the gospel is. He’s writing to people whom he's
taught and who’ve accepted his version of the gospel. The question seems to be:
“how do we live out the gospel right now? What difference does it make for how we
practice our relationship with God as Gentile-Jesus followers?” Remember the
framework. This is the gospel. But Paul’s letter to the Galatians is going to
focus on the practical application side of things.
But, now let’s turn this into a question. Who
raised him, Jesus, from the dead? In the text, we answered the question of who
raised Jesus from the dead by reference to God the Father, which comes right
beforehand in the verse. Bedford emphasizes that this reference to God the Father
refers to the Christian God. She writes that this is,
“the God who raised Jesus from the
dead and who is not to be thought of or worshipped in isolation, but whose very
mention is intertwined with the life, death, resurrection, and liberating work
of Jesus Christ.”[3]
Her
point is that Christians must always think of God through Jesus Christ and
remember that God is no other God than the one who raised Jesus from the dead. When
we use the word “God,” and we hear other people use that word, we have to keep in mind that—according to Paul in
Galatians—the only right way to define this God is by pointing to Jesus and saying
that God is the one who raised Jesus from the dead. Remember that the act of
raising Jesus from the dead is the beginning of victory in the cosmic battle
against the forces of death and everything that oppresses life. It is a
liberating and flourishing event. Consequently, the God who raises Jesus from
the dead is the God who is committed to human liberation and the flourishing of
all creation. This pattern of thought helps us identify what God is like in
some very specific ways.
I once saw a great bit by a comedian, and I can’t
remember who it was, set in the British Empire. There are these British guys in
India, when India was part of the British Empire, coming across these folks in
India and saying to them, “We British bring you civilization and advancement in
the name of God.” Well, the folks from India look at them for a moment and then
ask: “You say you bring us these things in the name of God, but which one is
it?” In religious studies there’s a humorous truism that Hinduism has 33,000
different gods. This is probably an exaggeration, and some Hindus claim that
they are all manifestations of a singular Divine. But, no matter how you slice
it, that’s a lot of gods or manifestations. Hence the question: which one?
Situated as we are in the West, our religious
instincts are all shaped by what we in religious studies call the Abrahamic
traditions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. All of
these traditions claim to be serving and following
the same God. In that context, we all take for
granted what God is and which god we’re talking about. But as the world becomes
more religiously diverse, it becomes more important to stop and ask what
someone means when they use the word “God.” If they can’t give a good answer to
that question, then ask them what the god they’re talking about is like. The
only Christian answer to that questions is to say that we’re talking about the God
who raised Jesus from the dead, who is committed to the liberation of the
oppressed and the flourishing of human life.
It’s also really important to have this kind of mental
and historical framework when we think about the doctrine of the Trinity.
Christians claim that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We might learn
different creedal formulations about what that means, but it all tends to be
very conceptual and abstract. We think about triangles and arrows pointing in
different directions. Have we seen these drawings? We think of three-leaf
clovers and explanations of how they relate to each other. But all of these
things ultimately break down and it stays conceptual and abstract. When we talk
about the God who raised Jesus from the dead, however, things have suddenly
become very specific. You can turn to very specific parts of your Bible and
read those stories, and those stories ground our theological imaginations in
important ways.
There's a
theologian named Robert Jensen, who died a few years ago in 2017. He wrote one
of the greatest theological sentences I’ve ever read. He goes even farther than
Paul here to tie the way we think about God back not only to Jesus but to the
fact that Jesus was a Jew. Jensen wrote,
“God is whoever raised Jesus from the
dead, having before raised Israel from Egypt.”[4]
I
love this because it destroys vague language about God or gods, and takes a
completely opposite approach. We’re not talking about “the divine” in general
here, or some kind of general idea of “God” that may or may not have anything
to do with the Christian God—and, frankly, probably doesn’t have anything to do
with it. We’re talking about this specific history and these specific stories.
What’s more, I love how he says God is whoever
raised Jesus from the dead. He doesn’t say God is the one who raised Jesus from
the dead. He says God is whoever raised Jesus from the dead. If you say
God is the one who X, you ultimately think you know who God is. If I say Connor
is the one who washed the dishes, it’s clear that I think I know something
about Connor. But if I come into my house and I don’t know Connor or who did
the dishes, and somebody tells me Connor is whoever did the dishes, then that’s
literally all I know about him. Jensen’s point is that all we know about God is
that God is the one who raised Jesus from the dead, having before raised Israel
out of Egypt. Anything else we might think we know about God is fake news. We
aren’t talking about general notions of what it means to be all-powerful, or omnipotent.
We aren’t talking about general notions of what it means to be all knowing, or omniscient.
Instead, we must focus on defining God and understanding God as whoever
raised Jesus from the dead, having before raised Israel from Egypt. God, in the
Christian tradition, is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and the God
of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Full stop.
This has huge implications. My boys are Boy Scouts.
Connor, this morning, is with his Troop at a different church for Scout Sunday.
We all know the Pledge of Allegiance, right? The Pledge of Allegiance includes
the line: “One Nation under God.” By know I hope you know to ask: which one?
Which “God” are we talking about? This phrase was
added to the Pledge of Allegiance during some of our lifetimes, in the mid-1950s.
At that time, there were arguments about exactly what God the Pledge is talking
about. For instance: does this include Jewish folks? There wasn’t as much
different religious diversity at that time, but the assumption was that it did
include Jewish folks. They even had arguments about not talking about a
specific God but talking about some kind of general sense of divinity, some
idea of transcendent morality that guides what we do. In that sense, what the
Pledge is really about is saying that we’re religious—we follow some god or
other, which is better than all those godless, immoral, atheist communists who don't.
That was the larger geopolitical context of the Pledge. So, when we think about
it as Christians and say, “One nation under God,” or when we hear our political
leaders say “God bless America,” that’s the perfect time for us to ask which god
we’re talking about. Then we look at what this “nation under God” has done and
we might wonder if the God that this nation is under is in fact the God of
liberation and human flourishing, or whether it’s some other god. The God of
American Civil religion that gets mentioned every time we recite the Pledge and
who our currency says we trust—is this the Christian God? Robert Jensen says,
“God is whoever raised Jesus from the dead, having before raised Israel from
Egypt.”
For Christians, as we engage in interreligious
dialogue and we work in an increasingly religiously diverse world, we should
stay focused on who God is in our tradition. But the flip side of that is we should
also stay focused on who God is, or the gods are, in other traditions. We can’t
just assume that whatever other traditions are calling “God,” the divine, or whatever,
is somehow the same thing we’re talking about. There’s a previous generation of
religious scholars that used to say all the different religions are just
different paths up the same mountain. Instead of that, we must realize that the
mountain that they envisioned was defined by Christianity. All they were doing
was shoehorning, one way or the other, all these different religious traditions
into looking like us. This isn’t fair either to those other traditions or to our
Christian tradition. The various religious traditions in the world have their
own identity and integrity that we should respect and endeavor to learn from. On
the Christian side, we should focus on finding God where Jesus is raised from
the dead, where Israel comes out of Egypt, and nowhere else. That’s our focal
point.
Karl Barth, the theologian that I study the most, wrote
a really memorable few sentences about this nearly a hundred years ago that are
still worth hearing today:
“God may speak to the church through
Russian communism, a flute concerto, a blossoming shrub, or a dead dog. We do
well to listen to God, if God really does so, but we shall not be able to say
that we are commissioned to spread what we so hear as an independent
proclamation.”[5]
We
encounter God anywhere and everywhere—in beautiful things, as well as in ugly,
repulsive things, in the flowering shrub and the dead dog. Where we expect to
find God, like in the church, we don’t necessarily find God. And where we don’t
necessarily expect to find God, like—perhaps—in Russian communism, we may
surprisingly find God. We can and do encounter God in all these places. But we
don’t start proclaiming the gospel of the dead dog.
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