Pauline Theology

Galatians 3: Why Abraham?

That Abraham “believed in God and was declared righteous” is an important point for Paul. But it is critical to Paul’s point to know when Abraham believed. He trusted in God’s word before the sign of the Covenant was given, in Genesis 15 not 17. What is more, Abraham believed in God well before his great demonstration of faith in Genesis 22. The reader of Galatians needs to know the whole flow of the Abraham story in Genesis 12-24 in order to grasp the full impact of Paul’s point.

Paul also uses Abraham as an example in both Romans and Galatians. Why select Abraham as the model of faith? It is possible the agitators themselves have been using Abraham in their teaching, since Abraham was a Gentile who believed God and that belief was “credited to him as righteousness.” Paul’s opponents in Galatia may have argued the Gentiles now coming to Christ are in the same category as Abraham, and Abraham was circumcised as a sign of his covenant with God.

Gen 22God credited this belief to Abraham. The verb חשׁב refers to considering an internal thought which “reckons” or considers something. It is an evaluation or something-“to reckon” not in the sense of counting numerically but of evaluative assessment” (TLOT, 480).

Righteousness is a key theological term in both the Old and New Testament. Christians tend to hear “righteousness” as personal holiness. Although this is certainly part of what the term can mean, modern reductions to “sinlessness” miss the rich use of this word to cover all sorts of activities from honesty to justice.

But in the Old Testament, righteousness is usually associated with one’s actions with respect to a standard, such as the Law. If one keeps the Law, then one is “righteous,” which implies a moral standard. But “sin” in the Old Testament is far more than moral offenses against God, physical uncleanliness separates one from God, so a woman (for example) who has given birth is “unclean” and needs to make a sin offering. Giving birth is not a moral problem, but a change of physical status.

In Galatians 3:7-9, Paul is creating a biblical argument, focusing on the phrase “credited as righteousness” in Genesis 15. In this story, Abraham believed in the word of God as revealed to him and God considered him “right with God” as a result. At this point in history, Abraham should be considered a Gentile, at least by the rules imposed by the agitators in the Galatian churches. He was uncircumcised and the food and Sabbath laws have not yet been given. Since he believes in the God who called him out of his father’s land, he a “converted pagan,” just like the Galatian believers.

This is in contrast to other views of Abraham in Judaism of the Second Temple Period. For example, in the apocryphal book Sirach, Abraham is described as having kept the “law of the Most High,” so God entered into a covenant with him and “certified the covenant in his flesh” (Sirach 44:19-21). Paul does not rewrite Scripture like so much of the literature of the Second Temple Period did. He considers Abraham as a Gentile who was made right with God by faith in what God told him, not by works (either circumcision or the Law).

Abraham is therefore the perfect model for Paul to use since he was justified before the Law: he was justified by faith not by the act of circumcision.

 

Galatians 3 – The Law and The Curse

The first two chapters of Galatians dealt directly with the relationship of Paul and the Jerusalem Church. In these chapters Paul has claimed that he was commissioned directly by God to preach his gospel to the Gentiles (1:1-2, 11-12) and that he is not under the authority of the Apostles in Jerusalem (1:13-24). In fact he consulted Jerusalem only when his success among the Gentiles raised the question of circumcision of converts (2:1-10). The pillars of the church at Jerusalem agreed with Paul that Titus ought not be circumcised. Later, Paul confronted Peter publicly for breaking from table fellowship with Gentiles. Clearly Paul is independent of the Jerusalem church.

Beginning in Chapter 3, Paul will begin to create an argument from Scripture which shows that God is doing something new in the Gospel. While the prophets of the Hebrew Bible often foresaw the salvation of the Gentiles, they described this salvation as a “conversion” to the God of Israel. The nations will come to Zion to worship, but (presumably) they will keep the Law as members of Israel. In the present age, however, Paul argues that Gentiles are able to be right with God apart from the “works of the Law.” This is Paul’s contribution to salvation history, something which he has already called a “revelation from God” in 1:11-12.

Paul packs together several texts from the Hebrew Bible to make this point, and requires a great deal from his readers. They need to now only know what these verses say, but also the context in which they are found. That Abraham believed is important, but when he believed is critical to Paul’s point: it was before the sign of the covenant was given (Gen 15, not 17) or before his great demonstration of faith in Gen 22. The model of Abraham’s faith shows that it is only through faith that one can be accounted as righteous.

The reader of Galatians needs to know the whole flow of the Abraham story in Genesis 12-24 in order to understand the full impact of Paul’s argument. Similarly, the quotation of Habakkuk 2 calls to mind a whole collection of events: the fall of Jerusalem and the Exile are the context of Habakkuk’s “complaints.” In response to the obvious fact that Israel and Judah have fallen under the curse of the Law, in Habakkuk they “righteous” must live by faith. Even to say that those under the Law are “under a curse” requires more of a reader than the single line from Deuteronomy cited by Paul. Paul’s argument is based on the whole deuteronomic theology of curse and blessing.

The density of this argument leads to a question concerning what is happening in Paul’s Galatian churches. If Paul is addressing pagan converts to Christianity, then would they appreciate the rhetorical impact of this scriptural argument? Possibly. But based on Paul’s speech in Acts 14 and 17 (clearly pagan audiences) and the letter to the first Thessalonians (with very little reference to the Hebrew Bible), it appears that Paul would not have made an argument based on the Hebrew Bible to a recently-converted from paganism congregation.

Two possibilities remain to explain Paul’s scriptural argument in Gal 3, although they are not mutually exclusive. First, Paul could be addressing God-fearing Gentiles, people who were already practicing a form of Judaism and were now being advised to fully convert to Judaism in order to be right with God. Second, Paul may be using these scripture because they are the texts used by the agitators in his churches. If Abraham were a proto-typical Gentile convert to Judaism, then perhaps one could argue that the sign of the covenant with Abraham was circumcision, therefore a present-day Gentile convert ought to following in Abraham’s faith and fully convert.

How does understanding the “curse of the Law” as an allusion to Deuteronomy’s “Blessing and Cursing” change the way we understand Paul in this passage?

What Kind of Jew was Paul?

In Philippians 3:4-6 Paul describes his Jewish heritage. In his own words, he was “circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, and the tribe of Benjamin, and a Hebrew of the Hebrews” (see this post on these verses in Philippians). In Galatians 1:13-14 Paul describes his “former life in Judaism” in which he “was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people, so extremely zealous was I for the traditions of my fathers.” Zeal for the traditions of the fathers often expressed itself in acts of violence, as it did in the Old Testament, Maccabean Revolt, and in the book of Acts.

It is therefore impossible to deny Paul was deeply committed to the Judaism of the Second Temple period. In Acts 22:3 Paul is associated with Gamaliel, an early rabbi mentioned in the Mishnah. The question we need to address as we begin to study the letters of Paul is how much changed after Paul encountered the risen Jesus. For example, he quotes the Old Testament extensively in his letters as Scripture. He uses these texts to support his distinctive teachings such as freedom from the Law for the Gentiles (the Sarah/Hagar allegory in Galatians 4) or for his understanding of justification by faith apart from the Law (Abraham in Genesis 15 in Romans 4). So what kind of Jew was Paul?

In Paul: A New Covenant Jew (Eerdmans, 2019), Pitre, Barber and Kincaid offer a convenient outline of four options for answering this question. First, some scholars would consider Paul a former Jew. This might be considered the “old perspective” on Paul in which Paul was converted from a Jew to a Christian. This conversion resulted Paul’s complete rejection of the Jewish law for both Jews and Gentiles. I once had a rather tense discussion with a pastor once how was convinced Paul no longer followed the Law after his conversion in Acts 9 and he firmly believed Paul was telling Jews who accepted Jesus as savior to stop following the Law. This is exactly the thing people in Jerusalem thought Paul was doing in Acts 21:21 and seems to ignore Paul’s statement in Acts 23:1 that he had fulfilled his duty to God in all good conscience. Yet Paul does consider his previous life rubbish (Phil 3:8) and he states he is not under the Law in 1 Corinthians 9:20.

Second, since Paul’s break with Judaism does not seem radical, some scholars would describe Paul as an eschatological Jew. This is a position associated with Albert Schweitzer, but more recently with E. P. Sanders, James Dunn and others loosely associated with the so-called New Perspective on Paul. In this view, God has acted decisively through the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus so that the old age (of the Law) has passed away and a new age (of the Spirit) has already begun. Paul frequently describes being in Christ as a new creation, “The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Cor 5:17). This two-age thinking is also found in Ephesians 1:21 where Paul says God raised Jesus from the dead and seated him in the heavenly places “in this age but also in the one to come” (although Pitre, Barber and Kincaid do not include this verse in their book). I want to return to this point in a later post, since the Apocalyptic Paul is a hot-topic right now.

Third, a minority of scholars consider Paul a Torah-observant Jews. Pitre, Barber and Kincaid cite Paula Eisenbaum’s Paul was Not a Christian, John Gager’s Reinventing Paul (Oxford, 2000), and several articles by Mark Nanos (many are now collected in the four volumes of Reading Paul within Judaism, Wipf & Stock, 2017). In this view Paul never converted to Christianity and remained loyal to the Law. In Romans 9:3-4 Paul can still refer to Jews as “his own people.” Paul does not refer to Christians, a category that did not yet exist when he was writing his letters, but to assemblies of Gentile believers. Since Paul wrote his letters to Gentiles, the explanation for any negative view of the Law is Paul’s belief that Gentiles are not required to keep the Law. Paul would tell the Jews to continue keeping the Law because it is their means of salvation. This observation sometimes leads to a two-ways of salvation, one for the Jews and another for the Gentiles.

Pitre, Barber and Kincaid offer a fourth way to describe Paul, he was a “New Covenant Jew” (the title of their book). After recognizing they stand on the foundation of N. T. Wright, Richard Hays, and Michael Gorman, they argue the heart of Paul’s gospel is that Jesus initiated the New Covenant expected in Jeremiah and the other prophets. This is clear in Paul’s self-description as a “minister of the new covenant” in 2 Corinthians 3:6. They develop a series of contrasts between the old covenant (written on stone, a ministry of death) and the new covenant (written on the heart, giving life). For Paul the Law was never sufficient to save (although this is not anti-law, p. 45). They see this view of Paul’s theology as a thoroughly Jewish explanation of what God is doing in the present age, and one that is consistent with the eschatological expectations of the prophets. To a certain extent, they have used the best elements of the other views.

Although I have some reservations about the implications Pitre, Barber and Kincaid draw regarding restoration of Israel and the end of the exile, their presentation provides a reasonable method for keeping the complex web of continuity and discontinuity with Judaism found in the Pauline letters.

So what kind of Jew was Paul? Which of these four views best fits the evidence? Even though we have read none of the Pauline letters in this series yet, how does one view (or another) help make sense of the Jewishness of Paul?

Where Do We Find Paul’s Influences?

In his short book What St. Paul Really Said (Eerdmans, 1997), on Paul, N. T. Wright suggests all interpreters of Paul must place Paul in the history of first century religion. In other words, what are Paul’s influences? In his medium-size book Paul A Fresh Perspective (Fortress, 2005), Wright suggest Paul inhabits three or four different worlds, he is a Jewish rabbi, but one who was raised in a Greek environment and is trying to reach a Roman world with the Gospel. The fourth worldview is his new faith in Jesus as messiah and all that entails. Paul understands the Jewish, Greek and Roman worlds through the lens of Christianity.

Paul the JewIn his most recent and mind-bogglingly huge book on Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Fortress, 2013) works this out over the first 569 pages of the book arguing that Paul is a deeply coherent thinker who was personally called by God to be the apostle to the Gentiles, a role that is unique to him (563) and forced him to work out a theology which is different from the Judaism as he formerly understood it, yet surprisingly similar in other ways (567). But this theology is also up to the task of challenging the pagan world of the Greco-Roman philosopher and “street level pagan.”

Although I would two combine these into Greco-Roman making three worldviews, this is helpful for understanding Paul. By privileging one of the three worldviews we will end up with a stunted view of Paul. For some Paul is too Greco-Roman, he is creating theology by stealing from the mystery cults. For others, he is so Jewish he is more like a second Temple period reformer. It is possible to make Paul too Christian by importing into Paul’s theology elements of later Christian debates about developing theology.

It is possible to see Paul as more influence by one of the three, but is this necessarily a bad thing? For example, was Paul more influenced by his Jewish heritage, or did he embrace the Greco-Roman world order to fulfill his commission as the apostle to the Gentiles? Did he completely turn his back on Judaism after he encountered the resurrected Jesus on the road to Damascus, or did he interpret his Jewish faith through a new lens, that of a suffering and resurrected messiah?

In her provocatively titled 2009 book Paul was not a Christian (Harper One, 2009) Pamela Eisenbaum argues Paul is best understood in a Jewish context. For Eisenbaum Paul’s letters are only Christian because Christians chose to canonize them. There are not many distinctly “Christian” elements in the Paul’s letters. In fact, Paul is concerned with how other Jews understand a particular messianic claim (namely, that Jesus of Nazareth was the messiah). Although I am not at all persuaded by the book (obviously Paul was a Christian), but she does make the point that Paul is not a Christian in the sense that a post-Reformation follower of Jesus is a Christian. I doubt Paul would fit in at a meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society or the Southern Baptist Convention.

Paul and the StoicsThis could be said for “Paul was a complete Hellenist.” There are some less-than-academic books arguing Paul borrowed heavily from the Mithras cult or other mystery cults, but this has been more or less dismissed by serious Pauline scholars. More interesting is Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Paul and the Stoics (Westminster John Knox, 2000). This book is an attempt to compare Paul’s letters to contemporary Stoic writers. Although there are certainly parallels between Paul and popular Stoic writers of his day, it seems unlikely Paul would be mistaken for Seneca or Marcus Aurelius.

When reading Paul it is therefore important to keep all three worldviews in mind. He really does have a foot in all three words, or perhaps better, he understands both his Jewish heritage and his Greco-Roman world through the lens of the crucified and resurrection messiah.

What are some other examples of Paul’s thought which may lean toward Second Temple Judaism or Hellenistic philosophy? Is it possible to maintain a balance between these two poles? Or to put this another way, how radical is Paul’s vision of Jesus? How thorough is his rethinking of the Judaism of his day? To what extent does his view of Jesus require him to absolutely reject the culture of the Greco-Roman world?

Pauline Literature and Theology Fall 2019

This Fall I am once again privileged to teach Pauline Literature this fall. This will be my second pass through Longenecker and Still, Thinking through Paul (Zondervan, 2014). Both authors are top-notch Pauline scholars and the book is well designed college textbook with plenty of photographs, charts and sidebars. What I have appreciated about this book is the balance between the theology of Paul’s letters and the kind of introductory material these kind of textbooks usually are required to cover. Thinking through PaulIt is easy to get bogged down in the details of authorship, destination and chronology and give less emphasis to Paul’s thoughts. Thinking through Paul emphasizes Paul’s theology over the more controversial (and tedious) aspects of Paul’s letters. That is not to say I will not dwell on the tedious from time to time as we move through the semester, but the textbook at least avoids the dismal swamp of typical New Testament introductions.

What else have I been reading to prep for this class? I have finished Susan Eastman’s Paul and the Person (Eerdmans 2019), the first book on Pauline anthropology I have read in a long time. I received a copy of Pitre, Barber ad Kincaid, Paul, A New Covenant Jew (Eerdmans, 2019) last see and absolutely consumed the first 150 pages on one day. If is very good, and I look forward to working in some of the book’s insights into my notes. I have spent some time in the essay collection edited by Thate, Vanhoozer and Campbell, “In Christ” in Paul (Eerdmans 2018, reprinting a 2014 Mohr Seibeck volume). I will likely get some formal reviews of these three posted relatively soon, but plan on spending the next two weeks on some preliminary posts on “reading Paul.”

I will state upfront that I have strong opinions on the value of the Pauline letters for doing church today, and I hope some of these views will challenge readers to think more deeply about the application of the Pauline letters. I am committed to reading Paul in the context of the first century, as a Jewish thinker who is passionate about reaching the Gentile world with the Gospel.

I am curious what regular readers of Reading Acts would like to see covered within this overall framework? Are there any elements of Paul’s theology are overlooked or under-emphasized? Maybe the “apocalyptic Paul”? What about application of Pauline theology to mission?