PART TWO

Phenomenological Explication of Concrete Religious
Phenomena in Connection with the Letters of Paul

Chapter One

Phenomenological Interpretation of the Letters to the Galatians

§14. Introduction

In the following, we do not intend to give a dogmatic or theological-exegetical interpretation, nor a historical study or a religious meditation, but only guidance for phenomenological understanding. Characteristic of the phenomenological-religious understanding is gaining an advance understanding for an original way of access. One must work the religious-historical method into it, and indeed in such a way that one examines it critically. The theological method falls out of the framework of our study. Only with phenomenological understanding, a new way for theology is opened up. The formal indication renounces the last understanding that can only be given in genuine religious experience; it intends only to open an access to the New Testament.

Initially, we will interpret the letter of Paul to the Galatians. The letter to the Galatians was significant for the young Luther; along with the letter to the Romans, it became a dogmatic fundament. Luther and Paul are, religiously speaking, the most radical opposites. There is a commentary by Luther on the letter to the Galatians.¹ Yet we must free ourselves from Luther's standpoint. Luther sees Paul from out of Augustine. Despite this, there are real connections of Protestantism with Paul.

The letter to the Galatians contains a historical report from Paul himself about the story of his conversion. It is the original document for his religious development and, historically, reports the passionate excitation of Paul himself. Correlatively, only the story of the apostles is to be invoked. To begin with, it suffices to seek a general understanding of the letter to the Galatians in order to penetrate therewith into the grounding phenomena of primordial Christian life.

The original Greek text is the only one to be used as a basis; an actual understanding presupposes a penetration into the spirit of New Testament Greek. Eberhard Nestle offers the best Greek edition: Novum Testamentum Graecum.² If one wants to use the aid of a translation, Luther's shouldn't be chosen, for it is all too dependent upon Luther's own theological standpoint. The translation of Weizsäcker (Verlag v. Mohr, Tübingen) or that of Eberhard Nestle is recommended.³

In the letters to the Galatians, Paul is struggling with the Jews and the Jewish Christians. Thus we find the phenomenological situation of religious struggle and of struggle itself. Paul must be seen in struggle with his religious passion in his existence as an apostle, the struggle between “law” and “faith.” This opposition is not a final one; it is rather a preliminary one. Faith and law are both special modes of the path of salvation. The aim is “salvation” , finally “life” . The fundamental comportment of Christian consciousness is to be understood out of this, according to the sense of its content, relation, and enactment. Reading modern positions into it is to be avoided. All concepts are to be understood from out of the context of Christian consciousness. In this respect the historical research of theologians has been of service, as questionable as it may be for theology itself.

The letter to the Galatians can be divided in three main parts: 1. Demonstration of the uniqueness of the apostolic mission of Paul and his vocation through Christ; 2. Conflict between law and faith (at first theoretical, and then applied to life); 3. Christian life as a whole, its motives and its tendencies in terms of content.

§ 15. Some Remarks on the Text

1:5: , “world.” The present time has already reached its end and a new has begun since the death of Christ. The present world is opposed to the world of eternity. [to whom be the glory] has a particular meaning.

1:8–9: The struggle for the “right evangelism.” Intended is not a saving of the Galatians; rather the original Christianity should be grounded from out of itself, without regard for pre-given forms of religion, such as the Jewish-pharasetical. Paul's own religious position is to be constituted.

1:10: Significant! Complete break with the earlier past, with every non-Christian view of life.

1:12: Paul wants to say further that he has come to Christianity not through a historical tradition, but through an original experience. A theory that is controversial in Protestant theology connects with this: [it is asserted that] Paul had no historical consciousness of Jesus of Nazareth. Rather he has grounded a new Christian religion, a new primordial Christianity which dominates the future: the Pauline religion, not the religion of Jesus. One thus does not need to refer back to a historical Jesus. The life of Jesus is entirely indifferent. Of course that may not be read out of a single passage.

1:13: Important passage for what is characteristic of Paul. [conduct-manner of life]: conducting of life, posture of life to which I am turned.

1:14: “zealot.” Paul's passionateness maintains itself also after his conversion.

1:16: (among the Gentiles): One does not know whether this became clear to him already with the calling or only gradually.

1:17: Arabia = East Jordan; perhaps ascetic life, perhaps already missionizing.

1:18: to get to know, therefore, “history” [“Historie”]

2:2: Emphasizing the “running.” Paul is hurried, because the end of time has already come.

2:16: “speaking justly,” stems from the Jewish religion. The life of the individual is a trial-process before God, against which Jesus turns ethically in the Sermon on the Mount (“conviction”). The [the law of Christ] later has a new Christian meaning. Paul's argumentation is here rabbinical-Jewish-theological. His own original position is to be differentiated from this view. The argumentation from out of the Old Testament is characteristically rabbinical.

2:17: This conclusion ab absurdum is found often in Paul.

2:19: Very important! Concentrated form of the entire Pauline dogmatic. [Through the law I died to the law] merely ethical. Since Christ is identical with the law, the law died with him (as does Paul, too).

2:20: Decisive for Pauline “mysticism.” Reitzenstein points to the connection of the terminology with Hellenism.⁴ However, one may not interpret exclusively philologically (hermetic writings).

3:2: [by believing what you heard]: from the hearing in faith. Cf. Rom. 10:11 ff.

4:3: [to the elemental spirits of the world]: under the elements of the world. In the Stoics indicates element, as already in Empedocles. Philo Judas (at the same time as Paul) designates the pagans as [elemental spirits]. Compare with 4:9 and 10: stars count as world-elements, the feast-times were arranged according to the stars.

4:8: [by nature are not gods]. The are divine beings. Compare with V. 1: The stages [?] under [?] the guardians are compared to the stage of the star-priests.

4:9: [to know] in the sense of love (as in the first verse). The love of God to human beings is what is fundamental, not theoretical knowledge.

4:14: “You took no offense to my sickness.” (Sickness often grasped as lecherousness.)

4:24: [allegory]: the allegorical textual interpretation was then practiced by Philo. (“Hagar”) means in Arabic “mountain,” or, that is what the mountain is called in Arabic.

4:26: [the Jerusalem above]: The final state of redemption is described in the Apocalypse Baruch.

5:5: Connection of [faith] and [hope] (cf. Cor.) is important. The bliss is not completed here, but is moved to the higher [world]. Compare to the “unwavering running toward the aim.”

5:11: [the offense of the cross]: That is the real fundamental part of Christianity, against which there is only faith or non-faith.

§ 16. The Fundamental Posture of Paul

Paul finds himself in a struggle. He is pressured to assert the Christian life experience against the surrounding world. To this end he uses the insufficient means of rabbinical teaching available to him. From this his explication of Christian life experience has its peculiar structure. Still, it is an original explication from the sense of the religious life itself. It can be further formed out in the primary religious experience. Theoretical contexts remain far [from this]; an explicational context is won, one that presents itself similarly to a theoretical explication. At issue is a return to the original experience and an understanding of the problem of religious explication.

Harnack's Dogmengeschichte [History of Dogma]⁵ begins only with the third century. According to Harnack, Greek philosophy first dogmatized the Christian religion. But the actual problem of “dogma,” in the sense of religious explication, lies in primordial Christianity. This here lies before us. The question of expression (“explication”) seems to be secondary. Yet, with this seemingly external problem, we stand within the religious phenomenon itself. It is not a technical problem, separate from religious experience; rather the explication goes along with, and drives, the religious experience.

“Law” is here to be understood primarily as ritual and ceremonial law. Also intended is the merely secondary moral law. Therefore, there is a struggle of the Jewish-Christian community for the law, the law as that which makes the Jew a Jew. [the work of the law]: the attitude to the law. The opposition of faith and law is decisive: the how of faith and of the fulfillment of the law, how I comport myself to the faith and also to the law. Phil. 3:13 shows the fundamental posture of Paul.

The third chapter, in particular, contains a secure dialectical argumentation. Nevertheless, we are not dealing with a logical mode of argumentation. Rather it arises out of the consciousness of faith of this explication itself. The expression [to consider, to speak] is characteristic for the articulation of the consciousness of faith, in the sense of making comprehensible the posture of faith for the individual himself, and being able to appropriate the specific-religious-comprehensible meaning. Paul shows his main theological card: the argument that Abraham himself would be justified only through faith. Accordingly, how does it stand at all with the law? 3:2: [the works of the law]—stands in sharp opposition to [by believing what you hear] (compare with Rom. 10:13, 14). The fulfillment of law is impossible; each fails in it, only faith justifies. Whoever thus stands under the law is condemned. 3:19 offers an accumulation of determinations that are supposed to suggest the inferiority of the law.

In studying the religious world of Paul, one must free oneself from drawing out certain concepts (such as etc. [faith, righteousness, flesh]) and putting together their meaning from out of a heap of singular passages of the Pauline writings, so that one has a catalogue of fundamental concepts that say nothing. Equally mistaken is the thought of a theological system in Paul. Rather, the fundamental religious experience must be explicated, and, remaining in this fundamental experience, one must seek to understand the connection to it of all original religious phenomena. In order to win a guidance for this kind of study, we will initially emphasize the phenomenon that lies before us in the letter to the Galatians. Later we will reach out historically further, not so much forward into a later time as backward to the original Christian community and to Jesus himself. To be compared with the fundamental posture of Paul is Phil. 3:13: Self-certainty of the situation [Stellung] in his own life—break in his existence—original historical understanding of his self and of his existence. From out of this, he performs his feat as apostle, and as human being.

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1 In epistolam Pauli ad Galatas commentarius (1519) in D. Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 2 volumes, Weimar, 1884, pp. 436–618.

2 Novum Testamentum Graece cum apparatu critico ex editionibus et libris mau scriptis collecto curavit Eberhard Nestle. Editio quinta recognita. Stuttgart, 1904.

3 Das Neue Testamen. Neu bearbeitet, mit Fundorten und Randstellen. Translated by Karl Weizsäcker. 10th edition, Verlag von J.C.B. Mohr, Freiburg and Tübingen, 1918.

Novum Testamentum Graece et Germanice. Das neue Testament griechisch und deutsch. Edited by Eberhard Nestle. Privilegierte Württembergische Bibelanstalt, Stuttgart, 1898.

4 Cf. Richard Reitzenstein, Die hellenistische Mysterienreligion nach ihren Grundgedanken und Wirkungen (1910). 2nd revised edition, Leipzig and Berlin, 1920, p. 48.

5 Adolf V. Harnack, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, 3 volumes, Freiburg/Breisgau, 1886–90.