Kindle Notes & Highlights
Because this gift did not fit with previous criteria of value, the Christ-event has recalibrated all systems of worth, including the “righteousness” defined by the Law. Founded on this norm-breaking gift, new communities can take shape, whose patterns of life are significantly at odds with both Jewish and non-Jewish traditions of value.
Had to recalibrate
Paul bears witness here not to general truths about the nature of God or the structures of existence but to a historical event, a “singular universal” that has redivided history and redefined the whole of reality.7
But nothing in Galatians will indicate that the recipients of the Christ-gift were worthy to receive it.
This is good news for us
The narrative that starts in 1:13 and runs through to 2:14 may be designed to refute alternative stories about Paul’s origins and conduct, but it has other purposes besides.
But for Paul, God’s decision before a person’s birth also signals that God circumvents any worth one might attribute to ancestry or behavior
Paul thus emphasizes the incongruity of God’s intervention in his life. His transformation was neither occasioned by his own action nor conditioned by his previous worth: it resulted from the unconditioned gift of God in the revelation of Christ. Paul does not criticize his former life for being blasphemously reliant on “good works,” nor does he evoke negative stereotypes of Judaism as intolerant or exclusive.
This works well with Dunn understanding "works of the law" to be things that were national signifiers.
Dunn pioneered an interpretation of Paul’s phrase “works of the Law” that stressed that these were not works in general but works of the Mosaic Law, and in particular, he argued, the “boundary markers,” such as circumcision, Sabbath regulations, and food laws, by which Jews were distinguished from gentiles. On Dunn’s reading, Paul was not criticizing “salvation by works” but an overly “narrow” or “restricted” view of God’s purposes, by which gentiles were being excluded or required to adopt ethnically specific, Jewish markers of identity.
Barclay, John M. G.. Paul and the Power of Grace (pp. 43-44). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.
To insist on the conformity of gentiles to the Jewish Law, or to any other preconstituted norm, would be to deny the essential character of the “good news” as an incongruous gift.
So Peter’s withdrawal was a catastrophic breach of fellowship: it implied that these gentiles were not fully members of the assembly in Antioch.
Practices were crucial for Paul, and particularly practices that formed, or fractured, community. But his rationale was always theological as well as social. Peter, he says, was “not walking straight in line with the truth of the good news” (2:14). Paul’s mission efforts were directed toward the formation of new communities, and it is impossible to form a community committed to the mutual responsibility of “bearing one another’s burdens” (6:2) if its members cannot eat together.
You and I, Peter, are Jews, used to thinking of ourselves as categorically distinct from (and better than) “gentile sinners.” But we know that a person is not considered righteous (of good standing) before God through observing the Mosaic Law, except through trust in Christ, and we have put our trust in Christ so as to be considered righteous in that way. But if we seek divine affirmation in Christ, and our resulting behavior (as in Antioch) makes us look like “sinners,” has Christ led us into sin? No way! Only if I were to reinstate the Law as the measurement of righteousness would I make
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First, I take “works of the Law” (erga nomou) to refer to the observance of the Mosaic Law.
Secondly, I interpret the verb dikaioō (usually translated “justify”) as “consider someone righteous.”
Thirdly, I take the Greek phrase pistis Christou to mean “trust in Christ.”
“Trust” is a better word than “faith” since it evokes a relationship, and what Paul is talking about is not belief in a set of impersonal truths but personal dependence on what God has effected in the death and resurrection of Jesus.
Should we use trust instead of faith?
The one thing that counts—counts for everyone, Jew and non-Jew, and counts invariably, in all circumstances—is “being considered righteous in Christ”
“Peter,” he says, “you and I now know that a person is counted acceptable before God not on the basis of their practice of the Law but because of their trust in Christ—trust that signals absolute dependence on the gift given in Christ. The practice of the Law is not what counts before God in any absolute or complete sense. In making this total investment in Christ, our fellowship with gentile believers may require that we contravene the standard of ‘righteousness’ that we previously thought was integral to our good standing before God.
To the contrary, faith as trust in Christ is a declaration of bankruptcy, a radical and shattering recognition that the only capital in God’s economy is the gift of Christ, a gift given without regard to any other criterion of worth.
Good summary of what he means by trust/faith in Christ
Paul’s rivals in Galatia likely placed the Christ-event on a narrative line that featured the Law as the ultimate expression of God’s will, given through Moses, confirmed by the Messiah Jesus, and fulfilled in the Law-observance of believers, both Jews and gentiles.
all time, corresponding to the unwritten law of nature.2 Thus the missionaries in Galatia could draw on any number of strands in the Jewish tradition to take pride in the Law as the centerpiece of God’s revelation to Israel and to the world. It was entirely natural that they should place God’s gift of Christ and of the Spirit within this Law-configured frame.
He interprets history from the vantage point of the Christ-event, not the Christ-event within the frame of a Law-shaped history. It is not that the Christ-gift comes out of the blue. It is the fulfillment, Paul insists, of God’s promises to Abraham.
they are shocked into recognition that the Christ-event cannot be confined within the parameters of their own tradition.
The Spirit has been given without regard to the Torah, which was for Jews the most significant bearer of symbolic capital or worth. To repackage this gift would be to lose it (Gal 3:4). A Law-conditioned Spirit is no Spirit at all, only flesh (3:3).5
So too with us today.
It would demote Christ to the status of a supplement, an assistant to the project of Law-observance.
Jesus is just a supplement under this model
It was given to circumcised Jews and uncircumcised gentiles, and thus shows both traits to be of no ultimate significance.
But he has come to regard the Law as another matter altogether—not antithetical to the promises but time-limited and, most of all, unable to deliver the blessings that were promised. Indeed, what he brings out here is that, even under the Law, humanity remains at an impasse—under a curse, under sin, and enslaved. If there is to be any solution to this impasse, it will need to come via a creative gift that makes the impossible possible, that frees, gives life, and grants blessing. That promised blessing, Paul argues, comes into existence only in Christ, and as believers are taken up into this
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how paul views the law
But was not the Law the means of that blessing? Sadly not, says Paul (3:10–12).
Christ, it seems, participated in the curse (on the cross, 3:13),
Christ participates in the human condition so that believers may participate in his.8
The promises were given 430 years before the Law was “ordained” (3:17, 19).
The Law, Paul insists, is not an eternal but a contextual phenomenon, and it does not supplement, still less alter, the original “covenant” of promises (3:15, 17). Those promises were pitched toward the future, but what they envisaged was not the Law of Moses but the “seed,” first and foremost Christ himself (3:16).
Bold claim in Paul’s time
The Law is not opposed to God’s promises (3:21), but it is not the rubric of history, nor the centerpiece in God’s ordering of the world. Try reading any Second Temple Jewish text to see what a radical claim that is!
This is a staggering statement, which empties normal systems of differentiation of their evaluative freight. All the pairings cited by Paul carry connotations of value.
This metaphor of heirs and inheritance might give the impression that all that is required is the passage of time, as children wait to mature.
But Paul interprets what happens in Christ not as a process of maturation but as a transformation, created by an interruption of time.
What is needed is not that children should come of age, in some natural process of maturation, but that God should intervene to change the conditions of the possible. That is what Paul traces in 4:4–6, which (like 3:13–14) summarizes the Christ-event as the participation of Christ in the human domain (and specifically “under the Law”) so that believers might participate in the privileges of the Son.
This is so insightful
The metaphor of adoption makes clear that “sonship” can come about only through receiving a new status and a new identity, as granted by God.
Paul thus reminds the Galatians that the most important thing about them is not inherited nor humanly ascribed or acquired: it is received as an incongruous gift (4:5). “So, you are no longer a slave, but a son; and if a son, then an heir—through the agency of God (dia theou)” (4:7).
Thus Paul yearns that the Galatians may be shaped again by the gift that reset their identity and their values: “My children, with whom I am again in labor until Christ be formed within you …” (4:19).15
"reset their identity" is a good line
The story of Abraham, Hagar and Sarah, and their sons (Ishmael and Isaac) is here taken to figure two patterns of people-formation (“two covenants”).
What Paul traces in the Abraham story is the creative work of God, who gives life to the barren and creates a human impossibility, people here labelled “children of the promise” (4:28).
At every point, the fulfillment of the promise in Christ alters and interrupts the human story:
Where one might expect a different pattern—of heirs who naturally mature and so acquire their inheritance—Paul reframes the heirs as slaves, who require not time to mature but liberation and adoption.
This is so good. What you need isn't time, what you need is transformation.
the Christ-event has realigned history, not by adding one further chapter but by a cross-cutting incongruity that is “not in accordance with human norms” (1:11).
Pauline scholars who stress the “covenant faithfulness” of God are right to insist that the Christ-event does not come out of the blue but pulls together the threads of God’s promises.21
But Israel’s history does not progress in stages, and “the fullness of time” (4:4) is an irruptive event, not a matter of chronological development.
hmmm. never thought about this distinction
To live from the Spirit is at the same time to walk by its norms.
If the unconditioned gift of Christ jolts believers out of their standard expectations and values, it also shapes them anew. They are not “free” to adopt whatever practices they want.
“The flesh” is not limited to physical appetites, as we might think; even the list of the “works of the flesh” in 5:19–21 includes social and “religious” phenomena, not merely what we might call “sins of the flesh.”
In fact, “flesh” has become a label for the whole realm of activity, power, and meaning outside of the Christ-event and its Spirit-created consequences.
what is flesh
