A Quid without Any Quo

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Everyone,

First, I want to thank all of you for supporting this platform and allowing me into your inbox and brain space on a regular basis. Your feedback and encouragement have been a blessing to me.

Second, I’m excited to share that my new book, A Quid without Any Quo: Gospel Freedom According to Galatians, is now available from Cascade Press.

Do me a solid and get a hard copy or Kindle version HERE . A few other ways you can help:

Leave a brief endorsement on the book’s Amazon page— it helps very much.

Share it out on social media to your tribes.

Become a Founding Member of this Substack or Gift One to another, and I will send you a signed copy of the book gratis.

The Englewood Review of Books recently listed A Quid without Any Quo as one of the ten theology books to anticipate. It’s probably the only time I’ll every be listed alongside Richard Bauckham so seize the moment and get a copy.

Besides, Quid is dedicated to Fleming Rutledge. It will make her happy to know there are copies out there in the world.

Ok, so this post isn’t all hustle and no gift, here is the foreword to the book by my plus-one, Dr. Ken Jones:

The twenty-century marriage between God’s word and the church has been a rocky one. It’s reminiscent of the God-arranged marriage between the Old Testament prophet Hosea and the prostitute Gomer. It was a marriage that produced children named Unloved and No-Relation. By the end of the prophet’s speech, though, God declares, “I will betroth you in faithfulness, and you will acknowledge the Lord.”

There are all kinds of things you might assume about this marriage from the outside, but Paul’s Letter to the Galatians gives us an insider’s look at what happens when a divine word both judges and loves sinners into freedom and new life. Galatians is sort of a day-in-the-life marital snapshot.

It’s a moment of vivid truth-telling when the gentile Galatians show themselves equal to the Israelites in faithlessness, even as they serve as predictors of our own stance in regard to God’s promise in Christ. An honest reader of Galatians is forced into a self-reckoning. Paul calls the gentile converts away from a slide into faithlessness that would result in a devastating breach with God. It’s judgment and he’s purple-faced angry. No doubt about that. But he never lets them forget the promise of Jesus’ own faithfulness that claimed them in the first place. He’s a damn fine couples counselor.

For us to experience the shock and relief that comes in an encounter with Galatians requires more than simply words on a page. Cleopas and his pal on the way to Emmaus had the text of the Old Testament well in hand, yet they still couldn’t grasp what the events of Passover in Jerusalem meant. They needed the well-disguised Jesus they met roadside to make sense of it. In other words, even mere hours after the women returned from the empty tomb, the faith of the Emmaus travelers required interpretation.

Jesus was the first preacher of the gospel. If the span of a few hours and days after Christ’s death and resurrection already showed the need for biblical commentary, how much more do we need help making a 2,000-year-old text come alive?

The Reformation catchphrase sola scriptura has often been seen as a demand for freedom from a magisterium established to tell us how to interpret the Bible. But that wasn’t the intent of Martin Luther and his fellow evangelical preachers and teachers. “Word alone” means the word is powerful enough to create faith. When God’s judgment and gracious promises are let loose, it becomes explosive on the order of Pentecost morning. With Galatians the problem is that the fog of those intervening centuries makes it extraordinarily difficult to hear this word with the auditory clarity of the letter’s initial recipients in central Turkey.

Jason Micheli makes quick work of this millennia-spanning task, because he is first and foremost a deft preacher whose weekly climbs into the pulpit have resulted in years of prime proclamation of the gospel. He regularly begins with those words on the page and then does an omnium gatherum, a pulling together of literary erudition, connections to popular culture, a deep awareness of his own and the rest of humanity’s brokenness, and an intimate knowledge of the broad arc of the biblical story. Sunday after Sunday he finds a way to weave it all together in a manner that makes the Holy Spirit a bit less in need of a postworship Sunday afternoon nap.

This brief commentary revels in letting us see its homiletical underwear. It’s born in the pulpit and shows us what Paul meant and means still. But it also serves as an antidote to the kind of preaching that offers up an arid litany of facts culled from commentaries. It’s a primer for how to preach. Micheli has bigger fish to fry than the usual biblical kommentariat: lengthier run-of-the-mill Galatians commentaries offer guppies of historical tidbits, but this one cooks up a swordfish filet that more closely resembles what happened between Jerusalem and Emmaus.

Micheli doesn’t just give an account of what happened way back when. He consistently seeks to provide the same quid without a quo that Paul did. In each chapter he pours a 200-proof gospel, straight-no-chaser.

Freedom with no strings attached. What happens in these pages holds the possibility of a person saying, “God, this is the strangest heartburn. Ever. I didn’t know I could be this free.” What Cleopas and his pal heard, what the uncircumcised believers in Galatia got from Paul, and what we have here provides us a promise bigger than millennia of commentaries, millions of faithless sinners, and masses of letters on a page. We have this one true thing: God has done the reckoning, and the accounts are cleared. We can quit the quid pro quo bargaining and enjoy a freedom in this marriage that’s lasting and free.

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