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§22 Paul’s Gospel Offers Freedom and Right Living through the Spirit (Gal. 5:13–18)

5:13 / Completing the wish of the previous verse, Paul declares that rather than listening to the “agitators,” the Galatians should recognize their true call. Paul has earlier described the Galatians’ Christian life as the result of a call (1:6; 5:8). Now he says they were called to be free. Freedom is one of the chief ways Paul has described the life in Christ that he preaches (2:4), and it provides a rich descriptive concept for his understanding of the gospel (4:22–31). To his Galatian readers it should be more than plain by now that, from Paul’s perspective, freedom is synonymous with the message he preaches (5:1).

But Paul recognizes that his understanding of freedom may differ from that of others. For him it is clear that the freedom of the gospel is not the freedom of self-indulgence but the freedom to serve one another. For those with philosophical or religious sensibilities, then as now, Paul’s statement is a truism. Self-indulgence is slavery of a sort, and the capacity and opportunity to love is freedom.

The command to be slaves to each other is, however, a strikingly dramatic way of expressing the nature of the love believers are freed to demonstrate. Paul may refer to slaves as a contrasting metaphor to freedom, but the concept also resonates with his self-understanding (1:10; 2 Cor. 4:5), in which he imitates his Lord, who took the form of a slave (Phil. 2:7). The life of believers is focused on emulating the life of Christ—the one who, as Paul puts it earlier in the letter, “loved me and gave himself” (2:20). In this way, not through circumcision, believers’ freedom is correctly embodied.

A discussion of the practical possibilities of the religious disposition for which Paul has been arguing now follows. Most of Paul’s letters contain a similar section, often called the “paraenetic” or ethical section of the letter. In this segment of Galatians Paul turns from his negative attack on the advocates of circumcision to a positive presentation of the life in Christ. This section also responds to any concern the Galatian believers would have about how to know what is ethically right. Since this concern helped make them open to the influence of the rival evangelists, it is important for Paul to articulate the ethical benefits of life in Christ.

The desire for personal and political freedom was as strong in the ancient Mediterranean world as it is now. Philo wrote: “freedom is the noblest of human blessings” (Good Person 139 [Colson, LCL]). Plato understands freedom as one of the virtues of the soul along with self-restraint, justice, courage, and truth (Phaedo 115a). The philosophers thought much about how one could be free, especially about how one could be free of the internal passions and impulses that enslave each human being. Philosophies promised happiness and freedom through conversion to different approaches to life. Philo wrote: “slavery then is applied in one sense to bodies, in another to souls; bodies have men for their masters, souls their vices and passions. The same is true of freedom; one freedom produces a security of the body from men of superior strength, the other sets the mind at liberty from the domination of the passions” (Good Person 17 [Colson, LCL]). Epictetus said:

I can show you a free man.… Diogenes was free. How did that come? It was not because he was born of free parents, for he was not, but because he himself was free, because he had cast off all the handles of slavery, and there was no way in which a person could get close and lay hold of him to enslave him. Everything he had was easily loosed.… If you had laid hold of his property, he would have let it go rather than followed you for its sake; if you had laid hold of his leg, he would have let his leg go. (Arrian’s Discourses 4.1.152–55 [Oldfather, LCL])

In identifying his message with freedom Paul was appealing to an aspiration prevalent in his culture, at least among those of a philosophical nature or blessed with the time to reflect.

From what the extant texts tell us, the ancient world sought freedom within the law rather than freedom as the opposite of law. Judaism thought of law abiding as the road to freedom, as did Jewish Christianity (cf. Jas. 1:25; 2:8–13). This was also true of non-Jewish ancients. Aristotle wrote: “it is preferable for the law to rule than any one of the citizens” (Pol. 3.11.2 [Rackham, LCL]); and “the law is wisdom without desire” (Pol. 3.11.5; ibid.). Freedom was to be found in the context of law. Dio Chrysostom defined freedom “as the knowledge of what is allowable [by law and custom] and what is forbidden, and slavery as ignorance of what is allowed and what is not” (Fourteenth Discourse: Slavery 1.18 [Cohoon, LCL]).

This general attitude toward law may go some way to explaining why Paul is comfortable speaking of law in the same context as freedom (5:14). The freedom in Christ is not a freedom from orderliness or communal life or concern for others. Rather, Paul’s vision of the Christian life is one that includes the highest interpersonal standard, that of serving others. His argument is specifically against the Mosaic law as a necessary requirement for Gentile believers. The freedom Paul extols is not anarchic but anti-Torah.

5:14 / Paul seeks to co-opt the power that the concept of law has with his readers, saying that he can sum up the law in a single command. He wishes to assure the Galatians that his gospel incorporates the entire law as far as it concerns ethics. But his gospel has incorporated the law in simplified form—a “single command”—for the law is fulfilled not through works but faith. And the faith through which the law is fulfilled works through love (5:6), that is, through being “in Christ.” Therefore the law is not an addition to faith but is completed through faith.

It seems paradoxical that after spending so much time arguing for freedom from the law, Paul should be concerned to explain how the law could be fulfilled. Yet, for two reasons it may have been important for Paul to make this statement. First, if it is the case that the Galatians were concerned with how to fulfill the demands of justice in their new law-free religious context, Paul may consider it prudent to frame a response in which he addresses this concern. Second, his statement gains the upper hand over the troublemakers’ claim to be the ones to have correctly contextualized belief in Christ. The rival evangelists considered that believers in Christ had to become law-observant Jews. Paul’s conviction is that to be a believer in Christ is to be a recipient of the promises given by God to the Jewish people but now extended to all. Having the law written on the heart was one of the promises (Jer. 31:33), and Paul may be claiming that believers in his gospel know the fulfillment of this promise.

The words summed up are a translation of the Greek word peplērōmati, often rendered “fulfilled” (see Rom. 8:4; 13:8, where it speaks of fulfilling the law). There is no precedent in Jewish texts for using the word “fulfill” or “complete” in relation to the law (so Barclay, Obeying the Truth, p. 138). In this statement, then, Paul expresses his unique vision that in Christ God’s purposes are realized, even the purposes previously articulated in the law.

Love for others is defined as the same as love for self: love your neighbor as yourself. Just as there is no escaping the necessity and wholesomeness of loving oneself, so in the Christian community there is no escaping the necessity and wholesomeness of loving others.

Paul’s directive to “serve one another in love” can also be translated “become slaves of one another.” The place of the slave was a position to be eschewed in the ancient world. Rare indeed was the philosopher or religious writer who would use the image of slave in a positive light, even metaphorically. Aristotle wrote: “one who is a human being belonging by nature not to himself but to another is by nature a slave” (Pol. 1.2.7 [Rackham, LCL]). Paul describes the kind of love that can fulfill the law as producing the kind of life required of a slave—a life lived entirely for others.

5:15 / Paul then approaches the nature of Christian freedom from the negative point of view, saying that if the Galatians keep on biting and devouring each other they will be destroyed by each other. This image works on the basis of understanding believers as indentured to other believers (having become slaves to each other) by all being in Christ. The ethical life based on being “in Christ” works because of the organic nature of Christian community: if they bite and devour one another, they too will be destroyed.

5:16 / Paul directs his readers to live by the Spirit. The Greek word translated “live” (peripateite) is literally “walk.” Paul uses this word elsewhere when speaking of living the new life in Christ (Rom. 6:4), a life that is conducted by means of the Spirit (Rom. 8:4). The word suggests continuance, progress, and daily attention. Paul commands his readers to avoid gratifying the desires of the sinful nature by means not of law observance but of living by the Spirit.

The Greek for “sinful nature” is literally “flesh” (sarx). As Paul invests this term with all that is against the Spirit, the translation “sinful nature” largely hits the mark. The word “desires” is singular in the Greek, expressing the sense that existence in the flesh is an existence characterized by desire. Philosophical and religious thinkers in the ancient world understood that desire was intrinsic to human nature and that it was a trap from which it was necessary to be freed. Desire means one makes one’s happiness or peace hostage to achieving or receiving what one desires, whether it be money, position, or another person. Epictetus said: “For freedom is not acquired by satisfying yourself with what you desire, but by destroying your desire” (Arrian’s Discourses 4.1.175 [Oldfather, LCL]). Xenophon has Socrates say:

Some are ruled by gluttony, some by fornication, some by drunkenness, and some by foolish and expensive ambitions which rule cruelly over any men they get into their power, as long as they see that they are in their prime and able to work; so cruelly indeed, that they force them to bring whatever they have earned by working and to spend it on their desires. But when they perceive that they are unable to work because of age, they abandon them to a wreched old age and they try to use others as their slaves.” (Economics 1.23; trans. Pomeroy, p. 111)

The Jewish thinker Philo advocated circumcision for “the excision of pleasure and all passions” (On the Migration of Abraham 92 [Colson and Whitaker, LCL]). A Christian thinker subsequent to Paul expresses a similar understanding of the goal of the Christian life: “One must live without city or home; one must have nothing of one’s own—no friends, no possessions, no livelihood, no business, no company; one must renounce human learning and prepare the heart to receive the impressions of divine instructions” (Basil, Letter 2; quoted from Wiles and Santer, Documents in Early Christian Thought, p. 212).

In distinction from Greco-Roman philosophical and Jewish approaches to the problem of desire, Paul understands that freedom from enslavement to desire comes through living by the Spirit. Life “in Christ” involves the will of the believer: a conscious and continual turning away from that which is opposed to the Spirit. Even after faith in Christ believers must combat the desire to be self-serving, to live for their own comfort rather than to open themselves to the expansive love required of and available to those in Christ.

5:17 / Paul portrays the human dilemma as one in which even the best of intentions are thwarted by the limitations of human nature. Paul’s description of the problem is that people do not do what they want. Unlike philosophical and religious systems that advocate a rule of life that might gradually free people from enslavement to desire, Paul advocates human will (v. 16) in cooperation with the transforming work of the Spirit.

Paul’s advice is an acknowledgment that there are daily struggles for those “in Christ”; that ethical dilemmas and failures remain part of believers’ lives. Paul does not promise immediate transformation or sanctification, but he does offer hope that while the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, so the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature.

5:18 / Earlier in the letter Paul affirmed the Galatians’ experience of the Spirit (3:2–5), which, along with his connecting of the promise to Abraham with the promise of the Spirit (3:14), suggests that the Galatians’ self-understanding was as those who were led by the Spirit. The sentence structure in verse 18 also suggests that the Galatians regarded themselves as those who knew the Spirit. The consequence of this fact is that they are then not under law. The subtext is Paul’s assertion that they do not need to accept the rival evangelists’ offer of law in order to live well. The plain sense is that there are two contrasting and mutually exclusive ways of approaching the ethical choices in life: through the guidance of the Spirit or through the guidance of the law.