Galatians in Three Dimensions | N.T. (Tom) Wright | Calvin University

And welcome to today's installment of the 2022 January series my name is Sheila Whitley and I'm a junior from Grand Rapids Michigan double majoring in philosophy and history I also serve as a worship Apprentice on campus this year would you please take a moment to silence your cell phones as you are doing so I would like to welcome guests from all of our 50 Simulcast viewing locations including Bellevue Washington Palo Alto California Manistee Michigan and all our virtual attendees across time zones we are grateful that you are joining us today now please join me in

a word of Prayer god of wisdom and understanding you have gifted us your word that we may better know you be formed by you in truth and love our neighbors as ourselves thank you for the blessing of church Leaders and Scholars whose knowledge and wisdom help your church to understand scripture as you intended it to be heard today we are especially grateful for NT Wright and we ask that you would guide his words as he speaks to us today may we be shaped into a flourishing christ-centered Community who reflects the love of your son whose

spirit is Among Us in the name of Jesus and through the power of the spirit amen And now Reverend Scott Jose director of the center for excellence in preaching will introduce Our Guest [Applause] good afternoon few if any theological authors or Bible commentators are quite as prolific as NT Wright who has written now some 80 books in fact it is said that some time ago someone placed a phone call to Tom which was fielded by an assistant I'm sorry the assistant said Dr Wright Can't come to the phone right now he's writing another book to

which the caller replied I'll hold but as wonderful as his body of written work is here at Calvin University we are so happy that today's appearance though virtual this lecture even so makes NT Wright the most frequent January Series Speaker of all time today is his sixth January series appearance and I think that's worthy of a round of applause right there Thank you Tom Wright is ordained in the Church of England which he served as the bishop of Durham from 2003 to 2010. for the next 10 years he was professor of New Testament and early

Christianity at St Mary's College at the University of Saint Andrews he has traveled and spoken extensively around the world and when he is not writing or speaking in his spare time he composes songs About the Book of Genesis with the just retired head of the National Institutes of Health Francis Collins riffing on the Beatles and Bob Dylan the guitar playing Duo of Collins and Wright have recorded the song's Genesis and most recently a new world has been born it's on YouTube look it up but one of Tom Wright's greatest gifts is making the Bible come

alive in ways that are fresh and vibrant which is why as also a preacher I am so excited to Hear today's lecture on Paul's letter to the Galatians and as a reminder there will be a live q a at the end of the presentation so please email or tweet in your questions as usual and chaplain Mary Hulse will be facilitating that in a little while the center for excellence in preaching at Calvin Theological Seminary is pleased to underwrite today's presentation now please join me in once more welcoming and learning about God's Word by listening to

Dr n.t Wright hello I'm Tom Wright speaking to you from my study in England in Oxford in fact welcome to my mess my workplace Paul wrote to the Romans that he'd often wanted to come and see them but had been prevented well I've wanted to come to Calvin College for this January series for a long time now to catch up with old friends and particularly to engage with you around my recent work sadly the pandemic and the flight cancellations Have kept me at home and I'm especially grateful to those who've worked hard behind the scenes

to make it possible for us to have as good a virtual experience as we can I chose Galatians for today because my new commentary which was published last summer is exploring fresh approaches which I want to share more widely Galatians has of course been Central for Protestant Christianity ever since Martin Luther hailed it as the Epistolary equivalent of his wife Katie Von Boro well I don't know whether the good Katie ever gave her husband a piece of her mind but actually Galatians itself ought to tell brother martin that though he got some things right there

were others where he went astray I'm not getting into that today but I worry that to this day the church's reading of Galatians has flattened the letter out like someone reducing a cube to a square Or a sphere to a circle to hear what Paul was saying in his own day and what he might say to us we need three-dimensional readings I assume by the way that anyone in a Calvin College audience already knows Galatians by heart preferably in Greek but if you're a tad Rusty I hope you've got access to a text to see

what I'm talking about Galatians comes in three parts a long introduction in the first two chapters The core of the argument and the central two chapters and the practical application in the final two chapters you'll find details and bibliography and scholarly discussions in the commentary now many of you will know the swings and roundabouts of modern Pauline scholarship if you don't please refer to my 2015 book Paul and his recent interpreters the classic view saw Jewish teachers telling galatian converts that they had To keep the Mosaic law in order to be saved Paul was saying

no the law is now set aside all you've got to do is to believe problem one most Jews of Paul's day were not legalists like that second this pushes Paul towards the marcionite view contrasting the Old Testament with the new whereas Pauls his great continuity particularly third it ignores his emphasis on Jesus followers as the true children of Abraham Fourth is run this traditional view runs into trouble in Galatians 5 and 6 where despite the previous emphasis against Works Paul here insists on a strict and robust Christian ethic fifth the traditional view has difficulty integrating

Galatians with the Positive view of the law in Romans sixth it ignores the meaning in Paul's world of key terms like piste's faith and dikhai Zune righteousness which regularly referred to communities of Fidelity and Justice not to systems of soteriology but seventh and most important Galatians is not about how people get to heaven heaven is never mentioned salvation is only alluded to briefly in this letter unlike Romans where it's a major theme actually nowhere in the New Testament does anyone suggest that going to heaven is the Christian goal Jesus taught us to pray that God's

kingdom would come on Earth as in heaven and the New Testament Ends with the New Jerusalem coming down from Heaven to Earth not with saved Souls going up the early Christian Vision Paul's vision is of New Creation you see the Protestant reformers were doing their best to give biblical answers to Medieval questions but the problem was the Medieval questions themselves once you think in the biblical terms of new heavens and new earth with God's people as the resurrected royal Priesthood within this new creation everything looks different we must stop giving 19th century answers to 16th

century questions and strive to give 21st century answers to first century questions so where do we go you will have heard of the so-called New Perspective in which Paul's point was that you don't have to be Jewish in order to be a Christian so that works of the law then are not good moral works but Jewish specific Boundary markers like circumcision and food laws and the Sabbath now that's okay up to a point but this too can be a bit monochrome I discuss in the commentary and in the book on recent Pauline scholarship other movements

such as the American so-called apocalyptic school who follow J Louis Martin and very differently there is a movement which now calls itself the radical new perspective or Paul within Judaism trying to argue that Paul remained a Torah observant Jew and wanted other Jews to do the same with the letters and the message of justification by faith addressed simply to Gentiles all that is in the background but I don't have time today to discuss it my positive proposal which I think outflanks all of these is a fresh reading of the actual historical situation of Galatians generating

fresh challenges to us in our actual historical situation so Galatians in three dimensions if you like space time And matter or politics Theology and human life the First Dimension is that Paul sees Jesus as Israel's Messiah through Jesus Messianic death and resurrection and the gift of the spirit the Divine purposes set out in Israel's scriptures are fulfilled and God's new creation is unveiled of course this ultimately means salvation Paul speaks in 5 5 about the Future Hope of righteousness that's There and he speaks in 521 of some people who will not inherit God's kingdom there

is a future goal a larger framework but Galatians isn't about how that works how people get saved it is about the church not that ecclesiology displaces soteriology rather it's meant to embody it if Jesus is Israel's Messiah this is the point Paul knows that his hearers are living in a new period of time between the Messianic events and the final establishment of God's Kingdom on Earth as in heaven they can live their Jews and Gentiles alike because on the cross God has dealt with sin traditional theology is contained within all this but it isn't the

main subject you see the central argument in chapters three and four focuses on the question who then are the people of God who are the true children of Abraham this wasn't a topic of much interest in the non-jewish OR anti-jewish world of The Middle Ages in the 16th century but it's vital for Paul for him in chapter 3 the biblical story runs from Abraham past Moses and the prophets all the way to the Messiah this certainly doesn't mean as some have been afraid it might a smooth progression a steady Crescendo building up to the Messiah

on the contrary as in the decisive passage at the end of chapter 2 the messiah's death comes as a radical break But it is precisely the messiah's death not somebody else's in other words this is the place where Israel's story however paradoxically is supposed to land and the messiah's people are then called to be the pilot project for the new creation which was launched with Jesus resurrection and the gift of God's spirit so the letter is thus framed between the opening in chapter 1 verses 3 and 4 God Has dealt with sin in order to

rescue us from the present evil age and the conclusion focused on chapter 6 verse 15 neither circumcision nor uncircumcision matters what matters is New Creation Paul's point glimpsed but then Twisted out of shape by the so-called apocalyptic interpretation is that Jesus followers as the Fulfillment of the abrahamic promises must now live in and by that inaugurated New Creation they Must not lapse back into the old one so this brings us to the second and most important dimension of Galatians what was going on what was the problem in the traditional view people called the judaizers had

been teaching the galatian converts that believing the gospel wasn't enough they needed to do the works of the law adding moral behavior to their faith by the way the word Judaism properly refers not to Jewish people trying to make Gentiles Into Jews but to Gentiles who are trying to adopt Jewish practices anyway things are more complex than we usually think I listened recently to a radio program in which an expert on Pakistani politics was explaining all the twists and turns of the last two or three decades including the significant difference between the Pakistani Taliban movement

and The Afghani Taliban movement and their respective relations to Russia and the west and China and so on and I Suddenly thought yes this is actually what real life real messy life looks like it isn't too easily defined movements a plus and a minus Paul's law-free gospel on the one hand the opponent's legal message on the other far too simplistic we need to go for three dimensions social and cultural and political as well of course as theological so what was going on I've argued in the commentary that Galatians was written to the churches in southern

Turkey founded by Paul in Acts 13 and 14 from the major city of pisidian Antioch and then eastwards to Iconium lystra and Derby and again my view is that the letter is written just before Paul and Barnabas set off from Syrian Antioch to go to the meeting in Jerusalem described in Acts 15. this view is still a minority position but it has strong archaeological and historical support And as I argue in the commentary it makes much better sense exegetically and the problem facing Paul's converts and the reason for the crisis can now be unfolded the

challenge facing any Gentile convert to Christianity is clear when Paul declares in first Thessalonians 1 that you turned from Idols to serve a living and true God wait a minute you turn from Idols that's like saying to someone in my generation you stopped using the car Or to a millennial you stopped using your smartphone Idols were everywhere everybody had them everybody worshiped them every town or city had two sorts of inhabitants the visible ones the humans and the invisible ones the gods and perhaps also the ancestors the gods included the big ones Zeus and hero

and Athenian Artemis and so on and the local ones and there were massive temples and Wayside shrines and indeed in-house shrines for your Personal favorites and everybody knew that if you neglected the Gods bad things were likely to happen if there was a flood or a famine or a city of fire people would at once asked who of their number had failed in their obligations to worship the gods to offer appropriate sacrifices to pray the prayers properly to attend the annual or monthly celebrations and so on in a world where life was lived very much

in public with only the rich having any Privacy and even then your slaves might tell on you everybody would know who was turning up and giving the gods their due and who wasn't and people would often spy on their neighbors and pressurize them to come into line this whole aspect of early Christianity that from day one a convert was supposed to abandon the ubiquitous Idols has not been sufficiently taken on board in modern Western Christianity we are Enthralled to all sorts of idols and because we don't normally discuss it we don't even notice it but

this was the biggest challenge for Paul's converts not just to break lifetime habits of mind and heart as well as a body but because it would at once Mark you out as a social misfit imagine today a neighborhood where every house displays a poster featuring the same political candidate and then one house Fails to display any poster or Worse shows one with the Rival candidate there are places in my country I couldn't possibly comment on yours where that would invite a brick through the window now multiply that effect by about a thousand and you would

get near what it would mean that when everyone else in Antioch or lystra or wherever is setting off to attend the procession and sacrifice in honor of the local God one family stays at home everybody would Know and if a plague struck the town the next week they'd know who to blame that is the reality of early Christian Life in the Greco-Roman world now there are two extra features of Galatians which bring the situation into sharp focused first the newest kid on the Block the fastest growing religion of the time was the cult of Caesar

and Rome Antioch right there in the heart of it all had been redesigned as a Roman Colony The Architects made it as much like Rome as they could indeed it was known as New Rome it was a striking embodiment of the Roman agenda to bring their civilization and Justice eusticia and dikh ozune to every corner of the world after all Caesar was obviously the most powerful God there was having brought Peace and Freedom and prosperity to the world all Empires claim that sort of thing in an age where our distinction between Politics and religion didn't

exist you're allegiance to season and both worship and paying tax and the Greek word for Allegiance was pistis Faith or faithfulness failing to offer that Allegiance meant trouble at every level a break through the window is a break through the window whether the reason is religious or political and it wouldn't just be bricks you might well lose your job a wife who converted and refused to join her Husband in the normal Civic religion I'd risk divorce a converted slave might face harsh penalties and so on so Caesar the kyrgios cosmo the lord of the world

took his prominent place by the middle of the second century a pinch of incense to Caesar's statue was a test case polycarp a hundred years after Paul the bishop of Smyrna was burnt at the stake for refusing that pinch of incense he wasn't the only one now that's the first extra feature but The second is the real crunch the Jews were exempt from all this the Romans had long realized that you just couldn't Force Jews to worship idols they would rather die the Romans were pragmatic Julius Caesar had recognized that this particular people thought that

for some reason their God was the only God so they wouldn't worship any others but in other respects the Jews were good citizens they had high moral standards they paid their taxes so a deal was Struck the Jews would pray to their God for Rome or Caesar or for their local city and its officials but they wouldn't pray to Caesar and certainly not to Artemis or Aphrodite or Zeus or whoever so the Jews had a free pass from normal Pagan worship and everybody knew it so here's the three-dimensional real-life real-time issue radically different both from

the old idea about people go judaizers telling converts to do moral good works and also from the Rather decontextualized New Perspective where the question is simply does a gentile have to become a Jew to become a Christian imagine yourself a citizen of lystra or Iconium you live in a world where everybody worships the gods because everybody does and otherwise bad things will happen but everybody knows that the Jews don't it's grudgingly accepted that they do their own thing But then quite suddenly here is this new group based not on ethnicity nor on social class nor

shockingly on gender a ramshackle bits and pieces group men and women slaves and free and even Jews and Gentiles together and they have given up worshiping the Gods and they're meeting together in secret something the Roman world was always very suspicious of and they're talking about offering worship to a different curios or a Different basil use another king indeed that's about all these people have in common allegiance to this Jesus this Christos this curios and when they're asked why they're not worshiping the gods and particularly Lord Caesar the answer is you know the rules we

belong to Israel's Messiah we are therefore children of Abraham and we are therefore claiming the Jewish exemption with that the fat is in the fire For a start it makes no sense to puzzled Outsiders in what way are these people Jews by what rate right are they Abraham's offspring whoever this Abraham was they're ordinary people just like US citizens of Antioch or lystra or wherever anyway they obviously aren't Jews they don't live in that part of town their males aren't circumcised they're not keeping the Jewish customs and what is this talk about an anointed one

Christos and did we hear that right that this anointed one is actually the lord of the world even the most generous-hearted citizens of Caesar's broad domains might shake their heads in puzzlement and anger and word would get round small tight-knit communities everybody knows everybody else's business before too long someone in Authority is knocking on the door to find out what it's all about And the more these strange deluded people talk about Abraham and Israel and an anointed one the sooner somebody will knock on the door of the synagogue leaders look they'll say you've lived Among

Us Peace peaceably you do business with us we don't understand you we don't know why you don't join in our normal life but we sort of respect you you keep yourselves to yourselves we've learned to live with that but who then are these people who claim to be Abraham's Children and so to be exempt from ordinary Civic life and worship the synagogue leaders will have known what was going on Paul After All Began his preaching in the synagogue in each place he got an enthusiastic hearing often from the Gentile god-fearers the hangers on around the

edge but the message about a crucified Messiah was too scandalous too Blasphemous for most Jews so the synagogue leadership faced with these Questions would try to disown this strange hybrid new grouping not least those Jews who despite the Scandal had been convinced that Jesus really was Israel's Messiah and joined in with the new movement but the leaders would do their best to discredit Paul to portray him as a crazy Maverick with a weird idea I don't think the Civic officials would be that impressed they might suggest Darkly that the synagogue leaders had Better sort it

all out otherwise their own privileged exemption might be called into question after all if anyone and everyone could just stand up and announce oh by the way I'm a Jew what was to stop the system descending into chaos good fences make good neighbors clear ethnic boundaries mean we all know where we are Paul's crazy multi-ethnic church was indeed a novelty a new creation and a Very disturbing one so the synagogue leaders will be thinking we need to get those strange Gentile Jesus followers into line with synagogue discipline at least outwardly so we'll be able to

get the Pagan officials off our backs so the synagogue leaders would put pressure on Jewish Jesus followers to persuade their strange new Gentile friends to adopt just enough Jewish custom to look good to make a good showing in the flesh Before anyone who might be interested the man would have to get circumcised and the Jewish Community could thereby demonstrate to the anyone who was interested that this new group though unexpected was so to speak kosher that's what the agitators the troublers as Paul calls them will have been will have been saying now that solution might

have looked attractive from one point of view but it generated real anger the social and Civic pressure could easily turn violent as social pressures can still do even in our enlightened times the instructions in Galatians 5 and 6 are not generalized ethics they focus quite sharply on factional and social squabbling and quarreling and even violence and people trying to play one-up games against each other Paul speaks about biting and devouring each other but notice what since this all makes of His charge in chapter six that those who want you to be circumcised are not in

fact interested in proper law keeping either for themselves or for you they just want to make a good showing in the flesh in order to avoid persecution it all fits now this scenario is of course much more complex and socio-culturally oriented than most previous readings of the letter it's much more like real life but if you've got your head around that Then there is a whole other dimension as well the diaspora synagogues in South Asia are not the only worried parties the sharpest pressure will come from Jerusalem Paul knew he'd lived there he knew what

the hardliners would be saying and thinking he had been one of them a Pharisee of the Pharisees you see Jews in the diaspora had mostly figured out how to live alongside their Pagan neighbors with greater or lesser contact or integration but for Jerusalem hardliners it seemed different think about it Galatians was written I think in the late 40s 48 or 49 less than a decade after Caligula famously had ordered a massive statue of himself in the guise of the god Jupiter to be erected in the holy of holies in the Jerusalem Temple you only had

to read Daniel very popular In the first century to see the point these Romans are the ultimate beasts from the Waters of Chaos hard-line Jews thrived on stories of pagan Abomination and idolatry and the Romans were now clearly the ultra pagans of course fortunately Caligula died before the order could be carried out but the Jews read the signs there were already movements of Revolt which would soon turn into the disastrous War of the late 60s so if there was a crisis coming And people could see it coming with God's loyal people fighting against the forces

of Darkness it was vital for Jews everywhere to stay true to Torah to be scrupulous in avoiding contamination from hamatoloi Gentile Sinners otherwise the promised Redemption which many believed was due to arrive any day might be delayed yet again they'd had enough of full storms this time they would stick to Torah for all It was worth and make sure as many Jews as they could would do so as well then God would give them the victory the Redemption freedom and peace so let's be clear the reason hard-line Jews Like Saul of Tarsus were zealous for

Torah had nothing to do with earning moral credit to get into heaven it was all about Israel being faithful to God in the hope that he would send his Deliverance at last on Earth as in heaven so any Jew going soft on Torah And fraternizing with Gentile Sinners was how it usually began was letting the side down such people had to be brought back into line that was why 15 years earlier Saul himself had gone off to Damascus but now word had got back to Jerusalem that despite their best efforts to keep their far-flung communities

in line with God's will chaos was breaking out in the diaspora and that Saul of Tarsus now styled Paul was at the heart of it Encouraging people to go soft on Torah breaking down the vital wall between God's people and those Pagan sinners so the non-Christian Jerusalem Jews already is suspicious of the local Jesus movement as being anti-temple and possibly anti-torah as we see in Acts the Jerusalem Jews would turn on their Christian neighbors these are your friends then you're claiming to be good Jews but actually you're in League with these people out there who

are ignoring The deuteronomic warnings about fraternizing with Gentile sinners put the picture together the Civic threat away in the diaspora is matched by the Jewish pressure in Jerusalem and that is when certain people from James come to Syrian Antioch as in Galatians 2 resulting in Peter's breaking off table fellowship with Gentiles and Paul confronting him and saying you're out of line and it looks as though similar people Perhaps one in particular have gone to galatia to urge the Jesus believing Jews there to put pressure on Gentile Believers get your Pagan friends circumcised they're saying or

we're all in trouble and they would add their own malign comments about Paul oh he wasn't one of Jesus original followers and anything he knew he got it from Peter and the others anyway he chose the bits he liked and dropped the bits he didn't which was probably why uh he and Peter Fell out in Antioch and they would say Paul after all he's one of those crowd Pleasers one of those people Pleasers we've got poems about people like him you've got to watch out for them they trim their sails to the prevailing wind now

hold that picture in your head and Galatians will come up in three dimensions only then do we understand the letters twists and turns the sudden stabs at shadowy opponents the refutation of slander and the Not So Subtle polemic against present Jerusalem and only when we go through that exercise can can we begin as our suggest in a moment to see what Galatians might mean for us today but before that though there is a third dimension what was Paul's response to all this the basic answer is of course the whole letter itself but it's hard for

many of us to put to one side the traditions of reading that We've known so long that's why I've written an old commentary but let me summarize the key points to begin with go back to the same point Paul insists at the start and finish of the letter that what matters above all is the launch of God's New Creation the death and resurrection of Jesus means that the present evil age has been decisively defeated and that all Jesus people are set free from it this is the strong point of the wrongly Designated apocalyptic school right

now something has happened as a result of which the world is a different place this isn't just a scheme about how you or you or you can have have your soul go to heaven when you die that's not the point the world is now a different place and part of that difference is that Abraham is at last getting the worldwide family that God always promised him But that new family cannot therefore and must not be defined by the Mosaic law instead it is called to embody in advance the promised New Creation welcome to Paul's ecclesiology

because that's the central argument in chapters three and four God promised Abraham a worldwide family but the Mosaic Torah would keep Jews and Gentiles separate therefore if God is fulfilling his promises the Mosaic law must now be set aside not because it was A bad thing now happily abolished but because it was a good thing whose task is complete that's such an important sentence I'm going to say it again the Mosaic law for Paul must be set aside not because it was a bad thing now happily abolished but because it was a good thing whose

task is now complete you see Paul's critique of Torah is totally different from Luther's reading it's nothing to do with earning Merit it's genuinely apocalyptic in the Jewish Sense rather than the modern American sense when the time had fully come chapter 4 verse 4 God sent his son and his Spirit to do as he says in Romans what Torah could not this is a new Exodus narrative describing how the slaves are rescued at last in order to become God's children and be given their inheritance in fulfillment of Abraham's promises see this isn't about comparative religion

always a danger that the New Perspective descends into comparative religion comparative religion which might suggest that we're looking at something called Christianity and something called Judaism and we're trying to decide which is the better no this is about Messianic eschatology it's a radically Jewish argument declaring that what Israel's scriptures had promised all along has now come about so to take on the Yoke of Torah even in one aspect like circumcision is To say that the new age has not arrived that God has not dealt with sin on the messiah's cross and that we are still

in the present evil age Paul's conclusion is Stern the passage at the end of chapter 4 about Abraham and Sarah and Hagar is the real thrust of the letter whoever is troubling you persecuting you trying to disrupt God's work must be put out of the fellowship as in First Corinthians 5 the corrupting Force must be stopped in its tracks that Is the challenge of Galatians not simply on no account gets circumcised but expel the Troublemaker from your midst all this then forms the central argument in which justification has to do with the question how you

can tell in the present time who the true children of Abraham really are and who could therefore genuinely claim the normal Jewish exemption they are the sin forgiven family as in Galatians 2. you see Gentiles who are technically Hamartoloi Sinners are sinners no more because if they are in Christ en Christo part of the messiah's family well the Messiah has dealt with sin on the cross thus Paul's main positive point is that all the messiah's people must now live in the present in accordance with the ultimate future that is live as a single family The

Singularity of Abraham's seed is Paramount neither Jew nor Greek neither slave nor free no male and female you are all one in anointed Jesus If you split the church especially along ethnic lines then you are saying that Jesus is not Israel's Messiah that the new age has not been inaugurated that the old age with its human divisions is still rumbling along tragically the 16th century concentration on how to get to heaven has meant that for many many generations this ecclesial imperative has been simply ignored Paul's long introduction in chapters 1 and 2 paves the way

perfectly for this He carefully and skillfully answers the charges against him and his long introduction climaxes in one of his all-time spectacular statements in 2 11 to 21 particularly verses 19 20 and 21. this is Paul's own version of the Antioch confrontation between himself and Peter you see by separating himself from Gentile Believers Peter was effectively saying the same thing as the agitators you Gentiles need to come into line no Common Table until you get circumcised no says Paul God has declared that believing Gentiles are no longer Sinners they are in the right this is

the full communal implication of justification by faith if you Peter build up again the war between Jew and Gentile which you rightly tore down then the very Torah you are invoking will condemn you no verse 19 through the Torah I died to Torah that I might live to God that's the line that the so-called radical New Perspective can't swallow at any price God has done the new thing he always promised and that new thing is the representative and substitutionary death and resurrection of Israel's Messiah so Paul declares I am crucified with the Messiah nevertheless I

am alive but it isn't me any longer it's the Messiah living in me the fact of the Messiah constitutes the fresh identity either of the believing Jew or of the believing Gentile this is The identity of all God's renewed New Creation people and Paul sees this gift of new identity the single identity for all Jesus people Jew and Gentile alike as the gift of Grace a gift which he would be spurning if for a moment he allowed Torah to become the demarcator of boundaries around God's people as in verse 21 I do not say no

to God's grace his outpoured love so all this is focused on that powerful climactic and decisive statement in Verse 20. the life I live in the flesh is Paul is still a Jew according to the flesh but that isn't the thing that tells you who he really is he is a Christos person one of the anointed family that life I live he says I live by means of the faithfulness of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me rhetorically this is decisive Paul is wearing his heart on his sleeve he offers

an unmatched combination of Theology and devotion the new status of being God's New Creation people is the gift of love in Scripture that means Covenant Love think Deuteronomy think Isaiah think the Psalms God's outpoured love for his people Jew and Gentile alike now instantiated in the messiah's saving death and with that at the end of chapter 2 Paul's own story is complete he's answered his critics and you can move to the main argument in chapters three and Four now there is no time today to explore chapters five and six but you can do that for

yourselves the key point there though is the charge against the local agitators the synagogue people who are putting on the pressure spurred on by those who've come from Jerusalem Paul says they're not actually hard-line Torah observant Jews Paul knows very well what Hardline observant Jews looks like and he knows that they're not Within a million miles of that they just want you to get circumcised so that they can put on a good front and avoid the persecution that will otherwise come but he says neither circumcision nor uncircumcision matters what matters is New Creation as in

Chapter 2 the world is crucified to Paul and he to the world he Bears the marks of Jesus on his body and they may well do so too in days to come so where does all this leave us today in Our praying our thinking our living out of the message of Galatians again three things very briefly because of time first we should be clear about eschatology and the church the church is supposed to be a small working model of God's future God promised to renew the whole creation the promises of Isaiah 11 and similar texts

but the whole Earth being full of the glory of God as the waters cover the sea these have been fulfilled in Jesus and are being Fulfilled by the spirit all the way until as in First Corinthians 15 God will be all in all we are not promised a platonic escape to a non-physical heaven we are assured of new heavens and new earth and the church is called to be the advance guard of this new reality the unity of the church therefore across barriers of ethnicity class and gender is the necessary sign in the present of

God's ultimate future world get the eschatology right and it Begins of course with Jesus bodily resurrection and you'll get the ecclesiology right so this is what justification in Galatians really means God has promised to put the whole world right in the end and in the present time he puts human beings right that is he justifies them by Jesus death and the powerful work of the Gospel he declares that they're part of his sin forgiven abrahamic family and he does this so that they can be Both examples and agents of God's putting right purposes in the

present time eschatology has been inaugurated the church is the advance embodiment of its ultimate fulfillment many things follow from that not least our commitment to Justice but this means second that we must recognize and reject any attempts as in galatia to put social and cultural pressure on Jesus people to conform to this or that particular Civic or Cultural agenda which would make them a mere religion rather than the advance guard of New Creation we have our modern and local equivalents of the suspicions and prejudices of ancient galatia and politicians exploit these for their own ends

and disastrously this divides Christian from Christian and old unhealed divisions along ethnic or class or gender lines quite possibly are drawn into this but the unity of the church is not an Optional extra I grieve over the way in which the reformers emphasis on faith not works LED them I think completely accidentally to ignore Paul's urgent plea for Unity neither Jew nor Greek neither slave nor free no male and female you're all one in Messiah Jesus the fragmentation of Jesus followers is not only a scandal in itself it has allowed us to be corralled into

various political camps in which allegiance to this or that local shibboleth this or That pinch of incense to whichever season whether it may be counts for more than allegiance to Jesus himself and the fact that we don't even recognize the problem usually shows how far we have slid away from Paul's vision so third and finally briefly but explosively the way back is to focus on the center which is of course Jesus himself Israel's Messiah the world's Lord he has loved us and given himself for us to rescue us from the present Evil age and to

create Us in him as the small working model of God's promised New Creation the warm devotion of Galatians 2 20 the devotion that has characterized Evangelical piety at its best must be reintegrated with the clear-headed understanding of what it means to be the messiah's people in and for the world Jesus was scandalous in his own day following Jesus was scandalous in Paul's day I suspect we have hardly begun to Glimpse what the real Scandal of the Cross might look like in the confused and dangerous world of the 2020s but one thing I know Paul's gospel

can get us through can find the way forward we need to put the Jesus of Galatians in the middle and work prayerfully and sacrificially to instantiate once more the three-dimensional gospel for God's three-dimensional world thank you very much [Applause] It's good to have you with us live now thank you for that on behalf of everyone here I want to thank you for the over 80 books you've written um my I was also wonderfully comforted by the scene in your study which I took a picture of and sent to my husband and said see this is

this is what we do this is what it looks like so thank you thank you Yes Tom I'm curious um so the commentary commentary that you mentioned that it comes in a series called commentaries for Christian formation now we don't normally look at Galatians and think if there's a book that we're really going to go with Christian formation or if I'm working with new Believers I may not turn immediately to Galatians So what tell us the story of how this was the commentary that was written first in this series and what Drew you to it

oh goodness they asked me a long time ago to write a commentary on Galatians they being erdman's Publishers and because I have always worked on Galatians as well as Romans which was what I did my doctorate on I thought wow yes I'd really like to do that it got put off and it got put off again because I was doing other stuff um and then Erdman said actually we're not doing the old series anymore we're doing a new one and we'd like your thing to be the flagship for that and I thought about that and

I thought well actually if I'm right about Galatians for instance in what I've just been saying then Galatians actually is all about Christian formation Paul talks about being in anguish of like a woman in labor until Christ be formed in you And so I said to the Publishers actually I think this will work and I really hope it does yeah I I was delighted reading it there were so many things that I underlined and thought Oh that's such a good that's a good way to unpack that and um I was really captured and you when

you're talking about how in chapter two when Paul um chapter two of Galatians when Paul confronts Peter and says hey you're out Of line and the point wasn't around um being a warm and fuzzy Christian being inclusive um you have this great quote uh I believe that the power the victory of the Cross had dealt with sin and robbed the idols of their power and that the life and the spirit had rinsed away the stain of moral pollution and that's What mattered most and Um talk about how preachers and teachers and bible study leaders can

use that idea that we are that the idols have been robbed of their power as a center point of Christian formation it's it's so important and it goes back of course to different views of what happened on the cross or theories of the atonement and I have argued at various places in my writing particularly my book on the cross the day the revolution Began that we have to integrate the different models with the victory Of God over the powers of evil as Central but the way that Victory is achieved contrary to what some people think

is precisely through Jesus representative and substitutionary death and I think actually that's coming out clearly in the four gospels themselves that would take a long time to unpack but the point is this I hear some of the modern worship songs talking about oh I was Very sinful but Jesus died in my place on and on and on it's a kind of the recurring theme well that's great at one level but in the New Testament the idea is that those Gentiles were Sinners by definition they didn't have the Torah they did all sorts of unspeakable things

therefore we can't have any associate education with them and the meaning of Jesus death on the cross for them and hence for the whole church is that no if they belong to the Messiah by faith and Through baptism then Jesus death has applied to their sinner status they are sinners no longer the victory has been won therefore we belong together in the family and since Paul says that we Jews he says were likewise sinners in all sorts of ways and you work through this in the middle of Galatians 3 therefore Jew and Gentile both had

a problem but God has created this new family which has forgiveness as its kind of notice over the door and if that is so then the Thing which kept the church apart or would have done has gone and tragically of course we have re-erected barriers to say people of this sort can't be part of our fellowship and so on hence the imperative to Christian Unity which I see even more strikingly now than I did a few years ago when I first started writing about this [Music] um one of our questions that came in from The

worldwide audience was around the idea of a unified church and even though in this book explicit in Galatians explicitly it's not about race or there's there are things we can learn about that so how how can we apply these ideas to current divisions in the church around race and ethnic groups well um one of the real tragedies since the Reformation is that because the church insisted the reformers insisted rightly on having the scriptures and the Liturgy In their own people's own language without anyone intending it to have this effect that meant that for instance in

London in the 16th and 17th century you had a Portuguese Church a Polish Church a French Church of this or that or the other and then of course we exported all these things to the new world and there you are um and people have taken that for granted and then the different theologies that have grown up have often Got that sense that we do things the right way and those people down the road well they're different from us anyway whereas the New Testament again and again Paul again and again is saying no the whole point

is we are all one and Christo yesu in the Messiah Jesus and that lovely passage which is really the climax of Romans though it's not usually seen as such chapter 15 verses 7 to 13 is all about that you may with one heart and voice glorify God and the father of Jesus Christ and Paul then quotes that wonderful passage from Isaiah 11 the root of Jesse Rises to rule the Nations and with that comes the whole of that Isaiah 11 1 to 10 of that passage which is about the wolf and the lamb lying down

together and the whole Earth being full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea and this is what I mean by saying the church right from the beginning was supposed to be the pilot project for new creation and we know in The Book of Revelation that the part of the Great worshiping Community is that it's this great multitude of every nation in Kindred and tribe and tongue and we have almost deliberately and carefully separated out no if you're from that Kindred and tribe and tongue you go over there and we down

the street we'll do it our way um and you know the fact that we don't recognize that's a problem is a sign of our large-scale failure to read the New Testament and so how do we fix that oh great question those of us who've done a lot of work ecumenically know that it's hard you have to find not only points of agreement but things which you can share learning to do together that which we can do together and there are actually lots of things where Christians can make common cause at Social Justice projects whatever it

is there may be difficulties there let's work at them But it's as people work together and then they say perhaps we should pray before we go about this are we allowed to pray with you well actually yes you are because we're coming to God the Father through Jesus and the power of the spirit let's do it and then how can we share worship how can we learn from one now there has been there have been great ecumenical strides in the last century things are very different from how they were 100 120 years ago when Catholics

didn't talk to methodists didn't talk to baptist let alone anglicans etc etc we now do more or less talk there have been new divisions on new lines which are splitting the church in other ways we we have to work at them fortunately the New Testament was very concerned about this kind of thing how to decide what are the deciding factors how to tell the difference between the differences that make a difference in the differences that don't make a Difference which is a vital thing to discern um so we've got the New Testament to help us

but it needs a lot of fresh thinking to get out of the old ruts that we've been living in and to see how we can do things together I have to say the fact that I as an unashamed unabashed Anglican have been apparently invited back to Calvin College of all places six times well Hallelujah shows something's going Indeed amen I want to highlight your book God in the pandemic oh which you wrote about eight minutes after uh there was a pandemic um it's actually it's been out for two years already so I'm serious about that

almost two years one of the things you talk about here is how the church should respond to the pandemic and so here we are about you know 24 18 to 24 months after you've written this how are we doing globally in our you know It's it's very odd the way in which the pandemic and the the rather Hasty actions that governments have taken have taken in relation to it have divided Christians and that was happening right from the beginning when in my country we were told you cannot use your churches anymore because they will need

to be deep cleaned and we can't deep clean them uh after every service and and there was quite an outcry about that people for whom this church building is Really you know this is where I've always come to worship and sing Etc um but actually a lot of people have said you know what um we are Easter people and on Easter Day Jesus is Alive and at large he's out there doing stuff he's not confined and we've had to wrestle with issues that had never been wrestled with before and then when it comes to further

restrictions like have you been vaccinated have you um are you wearing a Mask and all that um it's tragic really how people have gone tribal about this and and both in this country and I know in America and many other parts of the world um we just have a controversy about the tennis player Novak Djokovic I'm going to Australia despite having not been vaccinated and people all up in arms about that and there are this shows that there are basic lessons that we should have learned that we just haven't Learned about how to live wisely

in public and how to be humble about all this sort of thing and yeah how to wrestle with questions of when the government tells us to do this do we as a matter of principle say no no we don't believe in that or what so these are real issues and these have become worse since I wrote that book if I was writing the book now I would want to add a section trying to wrestle with those issues and I I freely admit they're not Easy but we we need to grow up and face these things

and not just Retreat into prepared positions [Music] well feel free to write that next chapter um yeah I haven't got anything else to do I know you don't I know uh this is my one of my favorite quotes from the book that was also in the Time magazine article and I'll close with this because I think this of all your Books has made me chuckle more than others because you're just a bit feisty and Sparky in this book in a delightful way so uh they were taught he's writing here about the regulations that were in

enacted and he heard someone say on television you'll be safe inside the church because the devil can't get in there I love this line I wanted to say trust me lady I'm a bishop the devil knows his way in there as well as anybody else That kind of superstition gives Christianity a bad name and uh Tom we're so grateful um I say uh number seven eight nine and ten of your visits are ahead of us uh to invite you back to Calvin so thank you so much for the time that you've given us God's blessings

to you and Maggie and your children and we look forward to welcoming you back on campus soon thank you so much thank you very much indeed and thank you to all those behind the Scenes thank you