AM I NOW trying to win the approval of men, or of God? Or am I trying to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ.
11I want you to know, brothers, that the gospel I preached is not something that man made up. 12I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.
Original Meaning
PAUL’S LETTERS MOVE from an introduction to the body of the letter. The body of Galatians begins at 1:10 and extends technically to 6:10. Galatians 1:10–2:21 is concerned with demonstrating the independence of Paul’s gospel. In this large section, sometimes called the “Autobiographical Section,” Paul argues that his gospel is independent of human teaching (1:13–17), of the major churches in Judea (1:18–24), of the Jerusalem “pillars” (2:1–10), and especially of the apostle Peter (2:11–21). By eliminating all these as the sources of his gospel, Paul accomplishes at least two things: (1) he creates the likelihood that his gospel is a direct revelation from Jesus Christ, and (2) he shatters the arguments of his opponents who contended that Paul’s gospel was not independent but was from Jerusalem or at least from those connected with Jerusalem. Therefore, they had argued (we infer) that these new converts to Christianity would also have to be full converts to Judaism.
By “mirror reading”1 we can legitimately infer from Paul’s focus and tone in 1:10–2:21 that the opponents of Paul were bent on demonstrating that Paul’s gospel ultimately derived from Jerusalem and from the early Jewish apostles who operated out of Jerusalem. By proving that each presentation of the gospel derived from Jerusalem, including Paul’s, the Judaizers could then argue that they, too, represented Jerusalem. Perhaps they even argued that they represented the latest expression of the gospel from Jerusalem. Thus they could correct, modify, and supplement Paul’s gospel with what they would argue to be the correct tradition. In fact, they may have argued that Paul’s gospel was an abbreviated form of the true gospel; they would then have continued their argument that Paul abbreviated the authentic gospel in order to make it more attractive to the Gentiles in Galatia.2
While all of this may seem irrelevant to each of us, what we have once again is a sociological crisis. Washington, D.C., is crucial to American politics (what comes from Washington is final); there is no place like that for Western Christianity (though Wheaton, Illinois; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Nashville, Tennessee; and Fort Worth, Texas, have each made their cases). For earliest first-century Christianity, Jerusalem was home, and from it all good things were supposed to come. We are surely aware of the critical role Jerusalem played in ancient Judaism; the same holds true for earliest Christianity. There resided all the authorities and knowledge needed for the development of Christian thinking. The apostles were centered there for much of the time, and the knowledge of the Bible was explored there. The crisis was simple: Was Jerusalem the mother church or not? Were the Jerusalem leaders the authorities or not? Who would set the agenda for the Christian movement—Diaspora Gentile Christians or the traditional leaders in the homeland? Would the gospel of Jesus Christ eliminate its heritage in Judaism or would it stay true to the covenant established with Abraham?
The crisis was whether or not Israel would have a privileged existence and status in the new movement. The issue then became Jewish distinctives as opposed to the heterogeneous and, often enough, non-Jewish life of the Diaspora. Paul countered this by demonstrating that his gospel was not simply Jewish; rather, it came from Jesus Christ and comprised all people. Therefore, it did not demand the nationalization of Gentiles. What Paul opposed was a cultural imperialism that presented itself exclusively in religious attire.
The first part of 1:10–2:21 states this explicitly. Paul argues that his gospel is not in fact dependent on Jerusalem and its leaders. Instead, it is an independent expression. He does this first through a series of questions (1:10), each of which implies that he is not seeking to please human beings but God. He then states his independence negatively (vv. 11–12a: it is not from human beings) and follows this with a positive declaration (v. 12b: it is from Jesus Christ).
Paul’s questions are important here. It is reasonable to argue that his questions contain their own answers. “Am I now trying to win the approval of men?” His answer: “No, in seeking to demonstrate that the Judaizers are wrong and that the gospel of grace is not nationalistic in its center, I [Paul] am merely seeking to remain faithful to God.” The second question then is: “Am I now trying to win the approval of God?” His answer here may be one of two things: “Yes, I do everything in order to live with approval before God.” Or, “No, neither am I seeking to gain God’s approval; I have that in Jesus Christ.” The former answer seems preferable here. Paul’s next question is: “Or am I trying to please men?” The answer: “No, I am trying to please God.”3 If this is the case, it can be inferred that the Judaizers had tried to convince the Galatians that Paul had trimmed his gospel to the bare essentials in order to court their approval—much like a computer salesperson who cuts all the “bells and whistles” so as to make the system affordable to a penny-pinching customer. Paul counters: “I am not trying to win your approval; I am preaching what God has revealed to me.” They respond back: “Paul is preaching cheap grace, grace without law, acceptance by God without submission to God. Paul preaches a gospel that does not include the cost of Judaism and the law.”
For Paul there is a radical difference between “trying to please men” and being a “servant of Christ.” For him, to accept the mantle of being a servant of Christ (similar to the term “apostle” in 1:1) was to eliminate once-and-for-all the desire to please people. His authority was now different.
What is “the gospel I preached” (v. 11)?4 There are at least three dimensions to “Paul’s” gospel: (1) that salvation is in Jesus Christ alone, in fulfillment of the revelation given through Moses in millennia past; (2) that one becomes accepted by God solely by faith, apart from living in accordance with the law of Moses; and (3) that this acceptance and church participation is open as much to Gentiles as it is to Jews. While the first two have been the focus of theologians since the Reformation, the center of attention in Paul’s day was the third. It was Gentile inclusion into justification by faith in Christ apart from the law that was the bone of contention between Paul and the Jerusalem Judaizers. Justification in Christ was acceptable to the Judaizers (after all, they claimed to be Christians). Justification for Gentiles was tolerable as well (Jews had plenty of precedent for conversion to Judaism by Gentiles). But it was justification before God without obedience to the law of Moses that became intolerable. This view threatened the very existence of Judaism and created the social crisis behind the letter.
As mentioned above, Paul makes his case by asserting two negatives: (1) his gospel is “not something that man made up,”5 and (2) he “did not receive it from any man,”6 as an apprentice learns a trade, nor was he taught it. Rather, in his positive statement: “I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.” Surely Paul is describing here his Damascus road encounter with the risen Lord, in which experience he was both converted and received his call to evangelize the Gentile world (cf. Acts 9:1–19). Paul’s gospel derives, then, from a revelation from Jesus Christ. “Paul’s claim … is this. His gospel, which was being called in question by the Judaizers and deserted by the Galatians, was neither an invention (as if his own brain had fabricated it), nor a tradition (as if the church had handed it down to him), but a revelation (for God had made it known to him).”7
The term revelation describes something made known by God to humans, in this case to Paul, that would otherwise not be known or accessible.8 Revelation thus stands in glaring contrast to passing on sacred traditions. In fact, we must surely see here a criticism of the Judaizers, whose basis of knowledge was sacred tradition. Paul contends that while their gospel may represent some of the leaders in Jerusalem, his gospel is a direct revelation from Jesus Christ.
Bridging Contexts
THAT PAUL’S GOSPEL was independent of Jerusalem seems to matter little to most Christians today. Christians readily accept Paul’s apostolic message as God’s living Word. However, before we can apply the truthfulness of Paul’s gospel, we must first understand why Paul needed to assert and demonstrate his independence. That is, before applications can be made, we must ponder what lies behind the quest of Paul to demonstrate the independence of his gospel.
We need to assert up front that independence is not the most important description of Paul’s gospel and is not the issue on which we should set our focus. Our attention moves easily to independence because of our own Western political ideologies where freedom of speech and other freedoms are central to personal happiness. Rather, the most important description of Paul’s gospel is that it is a direct revelation from Jesus Christ and, therefore, not an indirect gospel that had come to him through the Jerusalem authorities. If Paul’s gospel were indirect (from Jerusalem), it could still be correct but it would need to be confirmed by Jerusalem. But since Paul’s gospel is a direct revelation, it does not need to be confirmed by Jerusalem. In fact, the gospel emanating from Jerusalem could be wrong and, to reverse the trend, in need of being confirmed by the Pauline expression. Only after arguing that the gospel is a direct revelation from Jesus Christ does Paul argue that his gospel is independent.
Through this process of uncovering what was going on in Paul’s argument we gain our first insight for application: the preached gospel, when faithful to the Pauline gospel, is a direct revelation from Jesus Christ. This means that we should be less concerned with churches and leaders being “independent” than with them being faithful to the direct revelation to Paul. Accordingly, we must then focus our applications on the foundation of Paul’s thought (direct revelation from Jesus Christ).
In applying texts from the Bible, it is always helpful to glean as much as we possibly can from the historical context before we apply them to our world. In this case, it is fundamentally important for us to discern the social nature of the crisis at Galatia. We must learn what we can about the opponents of Paul (and not treat them as necessarily self-serving, evil, insecure merit-seeking Judaizers) and what motivated them. Our own contexts teach us the important lesson that when oppositions arise, disagreements are rarely simplistic matters. Rather, they are usually complex entanglements of theological issues, personal prejudices, and perceived significant implications for each social group involved.
I am sure we would be much kinder to the Judaizers (and less stereotyping of them) if we would take time to unravel their arguments in light of their situations. It was probably difficult for God-fearing Jewish Christians, who had grown up honorably in Judea in Judaism, who had then converted to the fulfillment of Jewish hopes as climaxed in Jesus Christ, and who had then fought with might and mane for the conversion of Jerusalem to this Messiah—it was probably difficult, I say, for such people even to imagine, let alone accept, a form of Messianic Judaism that was apparently running a course directly away from Judaism and the law of Moses. This we should not doubt, and we should also let such observations become fundamental to our thinking. Our first response to first-century (non-Christian) Jews should not be, “How could they have remained as they were?” but, “How can I understand why they remained as they were?”
To use a modern analogy, it is difficult for Christian parents to see their children, who have been raised in God-fearing Christian homes, go off to college and join some separatistic, fundamentalistic-type church. Such young people can become vibrantly enthusiastic about their new-found community. The parents of these children are shocked, not to say unnerved. They are aware of what happens to such young people: they mature into such a separatistic group, align all their friendships with such a group, raise “their” grandchildren to be like them, and, in effect, snap all connections with their childhood faith. So also the Jerusalem Christians were afraid: these Gentile Christians, they feared, would lose all contact with the fountain of their belief (Judaism, the Torah, Israel, the Land, one God)9 and might collapse the faith they were seeking to express; they would become a small group with no future.
On the other hand, while we may be more sympathetic with the Judaizers by understanding their predicaments, we must also continue the force of Paul’s argument if we seek to maintain apostolic authority and integrity. As far as Paul was concerned, however much the Judaizers’ arguments were tied to their social setting and personal issues, the product they were marketing was damaged. Paul knew their gospel was incompatible with his and too socially restrictive. It did not permit the full expression of a “race-less” gospel and therefore was incompatible with salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ.
Finally, we need to reflect briefly on whether our expression of the gospel is “our gospel” in the same way Paul’s was “his.” I think not. Paul was an apostle and was given a direct revelation of the gospel through a personal encounter with Jesus Christ. He was a founder of the church. We are not apostles, and there is no apostolic succession today that has infallible authority in matters of doctrine and practice. Thus, while we may be intent on conforming our gospel as closely as possible to the apostolic expressions, we must not form a new gospel for our generation. The “I” in the “I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ” (1:12) is not an “I” that is interchangeable with our own “I.” Even if we may have been called to a specific ministry (as Paul was), we are not given an independent revelation of the gospel in that calling.
Contemporary Significance
AGAIN, I MUST stress that independence is not the main issue here; rather, it is the direct revelation of the gospel to Paul through Jesus Christ. I suspect that the fundamental touchstone for our day is whether or not we are willing to listen to those whom God has entrusted with the sacred task of handing down the gospel from Jesus to the growing, emerging, and diverse early Christian churches (i.e., the apostles).
We begin, then, with the observation that because Paul’s gospel is a direct revelation from Jesus Christ, it ought to bolster our confidence in the message Paul proclaims and teaches. In the history of the church, it has been the Roman Catholic Church that has emphasized apostolic authority. Protestant polemics against the Roman Catholics have led the former not only to downplay the role of the original apostles, but also to weaken the biblical message itself. The apostles, Paul says, are part of the foundation of the church (Eph. 2:20); for this reason alone they retain authority and deserve our respect.10 Even though personal apostolic succession is denied, apostolic authority must be retained; and it is retained when the writings of the apostles are held as authoritative and canonical. We can therefore be confident that the message they teach is the message sent from God for his people.
As we read Galatians, we are reading a letter from a personal representative of Jesus Christ, the apostle Paul, whose message for us is the message of God. He received this message from Jesus Christ. Thus the implications of the gospel he spelled out are binding on us: the gospel cannot be restricted to one nation (whether to Israel or to America). It means too that the gospel spells freedom in the Spirit for all who call upon Jesus Christ.
A second significant area of application for us is that, along with Paul, we need to examine ourselves to see if we are “seeking to gain the approval of men” or succumbing to social and peer pressure (v. 10). Probably no feature of life is more difficult than this: discerning where our own line of approval is actually going. Is it going in the direction of God or is it being rerouted through the approval of human leaders, spouses, and friends? Are we doing what we think is right or are we trying to be diplomatic or political? This rerouting can be subtle indeed: from the glance of a spouse during a conversation to a letter to a Christian friend. When the conviction of our own faithfulness to truth and the apostolic gospel gives way to the desire of approval from a friend, we have joined the ranks of those whom Paul attacks.
It must also be said that approval from friends, spouse, and leaders is not a bad thing. We have records throughout the pages of the Bible where people approve others and such approval is perceived positively (cf. e.g., Prov. 3:3–4; Luke 2:52; Rom. 14:18; Gal. 2:1–10). There is a fine line between being approved by others and having such approval as our motivation. Our motivation must always be to please God and him alone; if others disapprove of us when we know God approves of us, we must disregard their disapprovals. Our fear must be of God, not of humans. To be sure, at times the disapproval of others (parents, for example) may be disregarded at a later time if we discover that what we thought was God’s will turned out not to be his will for a particular situation. We can learn from such decisions, either to be more attentive to the Spirit of God or to listen to the wisdom of others; but nonetheless it is important that each Christian learn to live in the light of what God’s will is. Even when such hard lessons are found, the principle of seeking God’s approval remains. The opposition endured by multitudes of Christians throughout the history of the church, including our own time, is a living example of the fundamental orientation of the Christian’s life: living to please God.
Martin Luther, the leading voice of the Reformation, discovered in his monk’s cell that God’s grace had been so clouded by the darkness of church dogma and human works that there was no sun to be seen. When he announced his discoveries and their implications, he was called before the Roman Catholic authorities to see if he would willingly recant his ideas and so save his relationship to the Catholic Church (and the unity of the Roman Catholic world). The story is well known, and I quote from his famous words:
Your Imperial Majesty and Your Lordships demand a simple answer. Here it is, plain and unvarnished. Unless I am convicted of error by the testimony of Scripture or (since I put no trust in the supported authority of pope or of councils, since it is plain that they have often erred and often contradicted themselves) by manifest reasoning I stand convicted by the Scriptures to which I have appealed, and my conscience is taken captive by God’s word, I cannot and will not recant anything. For to act against our conscience is neither safe for us, nor open to us. On this I take my stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen.11
Luther is one, and his number is large, who willingly denounced human authority, peer pressure, and social stress and followed his conscience as God led him. The results have been a gift from God.
Third, we need constantly to examine our expressions of the gospel to see if they are consistent with the apostolic testimony. This is the principle of the Reformation, the revival of the church under Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin, when the church sought to straighten itself out by radically committing itself to the apostolic gospel and biblical writings. It must also be the principle of our day. And not only do we need to examine our expressions of the gospel, we need also to examine how people are hearing and living out those expressions. Both gospel and lifestyle need to be examined to see if the gospel is being heard correctly.
Let me give an example of this latter point. In my youth I was once told by a well-meaning Sunday school teacher that it did not matter how I lived morally. If I was a Christian (defined as someone who had accepted Jesus Christ as Savior by performing a certain prayer), then I was eternally secure and could live any way I chose. Now this teacher, a godly person, was quick to add that living a morally bankrupt life was not God’s will and would certainly bring my life into chaos and ruin. However, it is this teacher’s initial idea that I want to challenge. I maintain that the implication (the possibility of a morally bankrupt life for a Christian without endangering eternal status) is both inconsistent with the gospel and with the way the New Testament describes the effects of salvation. The gospel brings transformation (see 5:16–26). In other words, the original statement of the gospel may have been accurate: salvation is by grace through faith, not by works. But the implications drawn from it were nonapostolic: live the way you want. The apostles never drew the conclusion that some Christians do today, namely, that lifestyle is totally disconnected from faith and salvation.
A further point is that Paul’s statements of independence need to be explained in such a way that they do not conflict with his other statements of dependence (1 Cor. 11:23–26; 15:3–11) or confirmation (Gal. 2:9). In our own study of the Bible we must always examine our conclusions of particular passages to see if they are consistent with our conclusions drawn from other passages. Here in Galatians 1 it is clear that Paul asserts his independence. But we read in the first letter to the Corinthians that Paul saw some kind of dependence in his gospel. Rather than finding a blatant contradiction, which few authors commit, it is best to seek some kind of synthesis of the two positions in light of differing circumstances and purposes. The most appealing solution is straightforward: at Galatia, where Paul was being accused of being an abbreviator of the Jerusalem gospel (and therefore wrong), Paul asserts that his gospel did not come from Jerusalem but from Jesus Christ. In other words, Paul is talking about the source of his gospel to the Galatians. On the other hand, at Corinth Paul is seeking to demonstrate the essential continuity of his gospel with other apostolic expressions of the gospel and the heritage his gospel has. However much Paul wanted to assert that his gospel was independent in source, he did not shrink at the same time from observing that the Jerusalem leaders “gave him the right hand of fellowship” (see comments at 2:9); in other words, they approved of his independently derived gospel. The gospel Paul preached was consistent with the gospel of his predecessors; but the gospel Paul preached was not from them, since Paul got it by direct revelation.