Brigitte Kahl
Paul’s epistle to the “assemblies [ekklēsiais] of Galatia” (1:2) is a circular letter dating from the early fifties CE. Its recipients are Pauline Christ communities in the Roman province of Galatia, a vast, multiethnic territory in central Asia Minor, whose inhabitants—among them a sizable Jewish population—were subject and tributary to Rome, collectively unified and naturalized as Roman Galatians. The terms Galatians and Galatia at Paul’s time thus connoted a hybrid identity and location that, first and foremost, spelled out Roman victory and the power to name foreign nations and tribes (ethnē). More specifically, the common “surname” commemorates the successful subjugation and cooptation of the Celtic tribes, as the terms Galatae/ai (“Galatians”), Galli (“Gauls”), and Keltoi (“Celts”) were widely synonymous in ancient Latin and Greek. Spread all over Europe, they had clashed with Rome for centuries and once even sacked the city itself (387 BCE). Greco-Roman political mythology and art stylized them as prototypical barbarians and archenemies of civilization, for example, in the Great Altar of Pergamon (Kahl 2010). In 279–278 BCE, three of their migrant tribes, after an assault on Delphi, had established the easternmost outpost of Celtic presence in the ancient Mediterranean by crossing over to Anatolia. They settled in what is today Turkey, around Ankyra. Following a century of severe clashes with Pergamon and a devastating Roman massacre in 189 BCE, they gradually changed from enemies to allies and power brokers of Rome. Ankyra in 25 BCE became the capital of the newly founded Galatian province, with a magnificent imperial temple to the goddess Roma and the god Augustus that featured a monumental Greek and Latin inscription of the emperor’s worldwide achievements (the Res Gestae). Paul’s Galatians could be either living in these northern tribal territories of the province, or further to its south, where Rome made its presence felt through roads (Via Sebaste), massive building activities, and numerous veteran colonies like Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, and Lystra (see Acts 13:13–14:23). Yet no matter which geographic or ethnic part of the province they inhabited, their identity was overlaid with a hybrid Romanized “Galatian-ness” and their everyday existence shaped by the imprint of colonization (Mitchell 1993a; Kahl 2010).
This Roman contextuality, although never explicitly addressed by Paul and entirely eclipsed in traditional interpretations, might be key to rethinking some of the most troublesome questions that Galatians—arguably Paul’s most influential letter—raises for a twenty-first-century reading. In response to an acute crisis among his messianic communities, Paul tried to convince their non-Jewish Christ-followers that they should not adopt Jewish circumcision because they were fully legitimate Jewish children of Abraham already through Christ (3:1–4:31). This focal message was driven home as Paul recapitulated the formative events around Damascus, Jerusalem, and Antioch that established the coequality of circumcised and uncircumcised people “in Christ” (1:10–2:21). A new diverse commonality of oneness-in-difference was thus created that operated through love and mutuality (5:1–6:18). The uniformity of an all-circumcised ekklēsia, as demanded by Paul’s opponents, was anathema (1:6–9).
From within this fervent confrontation between “foreskin” and “circumcision,” Paul developed his signature theology of justification by grace and faith rather than by works of the law (Gal. 2:15–21), embedded in dramatic confrontations with the gospel-falsifiers (1:6–9; 5:12), “false brothers” (2:1–10), Peter (2:11–14), the allegorical “Hagar” (4:21–31), and the “stupid Galatians” themselves (3:1). This unrelenting antithetical force of Galatians has propelled its history of interpretation and often eclipsed Paul’s great emancipatory manifesto about baptismal oneness across split-lines of race, religion, class, and gender (3:28), as well as his visionary statements about self and other reconciled through love and bearing one another’s burdens (6:2). The polarization of “law versus gospel” and “faith versus works” prevailed, powerfully, not only molding Galatians into the core document of the Protestant Reformation but also helping to generate Christian anti-Judaism, patriarchal authoritarianism, and dogmatic policies of “zero tolerance” against others of all kinds—those (de)classified by wrong faith, inferior gender or status, or aberrant sexual orientation or social practice.
This standard reading of Galatians as the prototype of Christian conservatism and master script for the separation between Christianity and Judaism has been challenged over the past fifty years in the context of post-Holocaust, feminist, liberationist, womanist, empire-critical, and postcolonial approaches (Ehrensperger; Zetterholm). The “New Perspective on Paul” has entirely reconfigured the debate by pointing to the continuing Jewishness of Paul even after “Damascus” (Stendahl; Dunn; Wright 2005). Jewish scholars joined the discussion (Boyarin 1994; Nanos; Le Cornu and Shulam); feminist interpreters have either scrutinized Galatians for emancipatory traits (Gaventa; Osiek; Kahl 1999; Wiley; Lopez) or employed a hermeneutics of suspicion strongly critical of Paul (Fatum; Briggs; Schüssler Fiorenza 1999, 149–73); the native Anatolian context has been searched for hermeneutical clues (S. Elliott 2004; Arnold), and African American as well as African perspectives have been used for constructive rereadings (Braxton, Niang, Kamudzandu). Feminist Lutheran theologians have entered into the debate (Streufert). At the same time, empire-critical and postcolonial reconstructions have remapped the interpretational debates by pointing to the Roman rather than exclusively Jewish or Hellenistic contexts of Paul’s theology (Horsley 1997; 2000; Stanley).
Right now, the interpretation of Galatians is shifting. The circumcision conflict at the heart of the letter appears as having been codetermined by Roman and civic pressures on the Galatians to conform to standard norms, apart from questions of the value or significance of the Torah itself (Winter, 124–43; Nanos, 257–71). The long-neglected phenomenon of Roman emperor worship, which was in fact massively present in provincial Galatia at the time of Paul (Hardin), points to the political idolatry of empire as potentially the primary target of Paul’s polemics (Kahl 2010). And a new debate about the term “Christianity”—a term Paul himself never used—is emerging. Paul’s messianic converts in Galatia defy our attempts at labeling or categorizing them (Boyarin 2004; Johnson Hodge; Campbell; Garroway), Instead of neatly categorized identities, we encounter here a messianic hybridity of multiply shaped identities, practiced as the commonality of love “in Christ.” This hybridity mimics and mocks, summons and subverts the hybrid imperial identity imposed by Rome and her false gods.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, appropriations of Galatians are being reoriented toward entirely new types of dialogue and interaction across all kinds of boundaries that dissect the body of humanity—and, for Christian interpreters, the body of Christ.
Galatians 1:1–9: The Other Gospel and the End of Otherness
THE TEXT IN ITS ANCIENT CONTEXT
Tied into his signature greeting of “grace … and peace,” Paul in the prescript of his letter highlights the key elements of the message he is entrusted with as God’s ambassador (apostolos). The strong emphasis on a family-related terminology of God, Father, sonship, and siblinghood in Gal. 1:1–5 is noteworthy, as is the transition from the language of “I,” “he,” and “you” to the inclusive “we” and “our” over the first four verses, leading into the liturgical imperative collectively to worship and glorify “our” God and father (1:5). This concluding doxology is sealed by a participatory “Amen,” to be pronounced in unison by the extended multiethnic family of God. The prominent placement of the resurrection event in 1:1 indicates that these new kinship affiliations are based on God’s fatherhood, made manifest in raising Jesus Messiah (= Christ) as his son “out of the dead” (cf. Rom. 1:4). As children of “our God and Father” (1:4), “we” are reborn as siblings of Jesus into God’s diverse patchwork family of Jews and non-Jews together, a topic further explored in Galatians 3–4.
Read before the Roman backdrop, the political overtones of this ecumenical family construct are noteworthy. The establishment of empire-wide affiliations among diverse subject nations like Jews and Galatians, all of them united through a common fictive father (pater patriae), God (divus), son of God (divi filius), and Lord (dominus), was at Paul’s time the prerogative of the emperor alone. It was he who claimed universal worship and fatherhood, especially in Galatia, where, around 50 CE, the lure of imperial religion was omnipresent as never before (Hardin). Furthermore, the liberation out of this “present evil age” (1:4) in the apocalyptic key of a new age lasting “forever and ever” (1:5), starkly clashed with the Roman ideology of a present “golden age”; it evoked a new exodus out of Roman slavery that was initiated when God’s Son—another divine son, of a supreme God and Father other than Caesar—was resurrected from a Roman cross. In light of this Roman contextuality, the contours of a conflict between Paul’s gospel of “grace … and peace” (1:3) and Roman peace (Pax Romana), between Christ-faith and imperial religion, are tangible from the outset, although Paul never addresses them directly—possibly in order to protect his addressees, whose names and locations he never discloses either (see Wright 2000; N. Elliott 2008, 25–43; Kahl 2010, 250–58).
What Paul makes more than explicit, however, is his stern disagreement with an “other gospel” that has gained ground in Galatia (1:6–9). Neglecting the most basic epistolary etiquette of his day, Paul abruptly moves from greeting to accusation as he indicts the Galatians of swift defection to this “other gospel.” A double curse is hurled against anyone violating the integrity of the euangelion (“gospel”) that Paul had preached to them (1:8–9). Full of hurt, anger, and sarcasm, Paul tries to disentangle the Galatians from whatever draws them toward those “who are confusing you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ” (1:7 NRSV).
Yet Paul is highly confusing himself. While he on the one hand anathematizes the proponents of an “other gospel,” he simultaneously and with perplexing ambiguity declares this difference to be nonexistent. The Greek text of 1:6–7 says literally: “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting … to a different gospel [eis heteron euangelion] which is not an other [ho ouk estin allo].” This sounds as if he is talking about two kinds of otherness, one that he fiercely contests, and one that he embraces as “not other.” Nowhere else in the New Testament is the term euangelion so programmatically discussed as in Gal. 1:6–2:21. Is the “gospel according to Paul” thus one, or is it one and other? With this enigma, the whole interpretation of Galatians is at stake.
THE TEXT IN THE INTERPRETIVE TRADITION
Traditionally, most translators and commentators have assumed that the “other gospel” was the Jewish gospel of circumcision that Paul wanted to leave behind. They thus saw fit to “correct” his paradoxical statement about difference and not-difference into an unambiguous rejection of the “other gospel” as being false or nonexistent: “I am astonished that you are so swiftly turning to a different gospel—not that there is another” (NRSV, emphasis added). With this, the “gospel of Christ” right from the beginning was cast into the “iron cage” of a binary construct that set Christianity off against the cursed other, whether Judaism or paganism or, in later centuries, heresy, or Islam, or other “opponents.” During the Reformation, Luther redrafted the root binary in Galatians between Christ-gospel and the false circumcision gospel as the antithesis between Protestantism and Catholicism: his opposition of the “gospel” of faith righteousness to the “law” of works righteousness became foundational for Protestant and evangelical interpretations until today (Kahl 2010, 11–16).
But what if Paul contested, rather than (re)inscribed, this binary order, and what if he saw it primarily “at work” in Roman law rather than in Jewish Torah? What if his theology of the other is much more complex and subversive than our (falsely) simplified translations of Gal. 1:6–7 have led us to believe? Krister Stendahl, spearheading the New Perspective already in the 1970s, showed that the core of Paul’s theology is not about excommunication of the other but community-building with the other—not about Christians versus Jews, rather about Jews together with gentiles (Stendahl, 1–7). More recently, J. Louis Martyn has done groundbreaking work regarding the apocalyptic “antinomies” or “pair of opposites” that were constitutive parts of the old cosmos but that were dissolved for Paul, through the Christ event, including the polarity of circumcision versus foreskin (Martyn 1997, 393–400). Thinking along these lines, we might regard Paul as criticizing the Galatians for applying an outdated binary model of otherness and oneness by moving toward circumcision; they act as if their difference (foreskin) still made them “other” to the Jews, or vice versa. This, the present entry proposes, is the basic deception of the “other gospel which is not another.” The Galatians cannot be circumcised because this would reestablish the oppositional structure of the world as self over and against other. That opposition for Paul is the essence not of Torah (cf. 5:14), but rather of the worldwide “combat order” codified as Roman nomos. In this reading, the “other gospel” Paul rejects is essentially the Roman gospel of peace through war and victory, although it is disguised as “Jewish gospel” of strict obedience to the requirements of Torah, that is, circumcision. This issue of misleading appearance and of “hypocrisy”—making the deceptive claim to represent nothing but God’s law while in reality following the logic of empire—is addressed throughout Galatians (e.g., 2:13; 6:12).
THE TEXT IN CONTEMPORARY DISCUSSION
Present-day examples abound for this dynamic of “othering,” which, in the name of God, tacitly replicates the law of imperial or colonial domination. We might take a look at Africa, where HIV has become a pandemic that affects millions of people and tears the social fabric of communities apart. One of the aggravating factors is the attitude of many Christian churches that stigmatize people with HIV/AIDS as “sinners,” rightly punished for their sexual promiscuity and needing to be cast out from churches, social life, and families to prevent further infection. In the name of Christ, taboos are imposed that not only cause enormous additional trauma for people with HIV but also prevent effective education about the spread of the disease and proper prevention. African theologians like Musa Dube and others have spoken up against the devastating self-righteousness in this “false gospel” that divides the body of Christ into a healthy and virtuous self over and against a sick and sinful other. This split, in fact, reproduces and reinscribes the law and logic of the colonial powers. Under the disguise of “rigorous Christianity,” a distorted, moralistic understanding of human sexuality is perpetuated that was once preached by Western missionaries who condemned African sexuality as the evil other, to be colonized and civilized by the superior Christian self (Dube, 77–92; Mligo). As in Paul’s day, the “other gospel” shape-shifts from allegedly proper faith to a law of domination, comparable to what Paul fiercely contested as irreconcilable with the coequal oneness and solidarity in God’s universal family.
Galatians 1:10–21: Damascus: Defecting from the Culture of Enmity
THE TEXT IN ITS ANCIENT CONTEXT
As if he were acknowledging the confusion among his readers regarding the “otherness” of the messianic gospel, Paul declares that it is indeed alien to all human traditions and teachings. Nor is it accountable to any religious authority apart from the divine revelation (di’ apokalypseōs) of Jesus Christ (1:12). God’s verification of Jesus as Messiah (Christos) struck Paul himself like a flash of lightning, unhinging his whole world. According to all human standards and norms, he had been impeccable and a model of religious superachievement, practicing Judaism flawlessly and with a competitive edge in his zeal for the “traditions of the fathers,” violent in his conduct of holy warfare against dissidents like the Jesus-assemblies (1:13–14).
At this point, the divine intervention, or rather interruption, hit him. God not only revealed (apokalypsai) the persecuted other as “God’s Son” to him but also charged Paul to proclaim (euangelizōmai) this “other” reality of God as “good news” (euangelion = “gospel”) among the non-Jews: the sinners, gentiles, infidels whom he had previously seen as the irreconcilable other to God, to Judaism, and to himself (1:15–16). This was a complete transvaluation of all values and belief systems to which Paul had adhered. He had become a new, other-defined self and was in a vulnerable position now, unable to “consult with flesh and blood” about the nature of his transformation (1:16)—a different person unknown to his former allies and victims alike, and probably to himself too. Initially staying away from Jerusalem (1:17, 22), he visited Peter and James only after three years and for a brief period of fifteen days. Arabia, Damascus, Syria, and his native Cilicia were the places where he was “now proclaiming the faith that he once tried to destroy” (1:23). He was out among the gentile others, an other himself, proclaiming the one God of Israel who is with the other (Isa. 2:1–4).
THE TEXT IN THE INTERPRETIVE TRADITION
“Damascus” over the millennia has become shorthand for the foundational event of Christianity and the beginning of the Christian world mission, which was all too often closely aligned with worldwide occidental colonialism and cultural imperialism. Once Paul’s experience was understood as a “conversion” from Judaism to Christianity, a transition from a narrow-minded Jewish particularism to the wide-open, transethnic universalism of a new world religion, Christianity was framed in a binary way and turned into an inevitably anti-Jewish self-construct. Furthermore, Martin Luther’s “tower experience” (Turmerlebnis) and search for a “gracious God,” which occasioned his break with Catholicism, was often anachronistically collapsed with Paul’s transformation from Jewish “Saul” to Christian “Paul.” Following Krister Stendahl and the New Perspective, however, this antithetical view was challenged, reframing the “conversion” to another religion as a prophetic call within Judaism (Segal) and emphasizing the lasting Jewishness of Paul (Dunn, 341–60; Nanos; Eisenbaum).
Another question concerns the relationship between Paul’s “firsthand” report of his “revelation” in Galatians and its noticeably divergent, later counterparts in Acts. Paul’s famous “fall from his horse” is mentioned in neither Acts nor Galatians, and the name change from “Saul” to “Paul” occurs only in Acts 13:9 (and is unrelated to Damascus). Other facets of the different accounts are plainly incompatible and have led to perennial scholarly debates regarding the basic chronology and key coordinates of Paul’s life and of early church history. Different from Paul’s own more guarded account in Galatians, Acts makes his post-Damascus conflicts with the Roman order very explicit (e.g., Acts 17:6–7), while simultaneously trying to minimize their importance and to present Paul as a Roman model citizen (e.g., 16:37), inflating instead clashes with Judaism—an interpretive pattern that has been prevalent up to today (Kahl 2008).
THE TEXT IN CONTEMPORARY DISCUSSION
“Damascus” in our language still stands for a profound life-changing experience. What happens if we realize that the whole construct we have used to validate ourselves while devalidating the other is no longer valid? Can strangers, aliens, competitors, adversaries, and even the fiercest enemies turn into neighbors? The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, cost three thousand lives. For weeks afterward, New York City became a sanctuary of mourning and shared grief, while an international outcry against violence and a strong wave of sympathy reached out to the United States from all over the world. Yet what could have become a decisive turning point—a “Damascus” of sorts—toward sustainable global peace after the end of the Cold War was incinerated in the fire of retaliatory strikes and military counterviolence. In their book on restorative justice and peacemaking, Elaine Enns and Ched Myers report how members of the 9/11 family “made poignant pleas that violence not be done in their loved ones’ names; instead, they turned their grief into actions for peace.” Venturing on peace-building missions to countries like Afghanistan, they “transgressed the strictures of wartime’s absolute demand for national loyalty by traveling to war zones to seek the human face of the ‘enemy’ ” (Enns and Myers, 71–72).
What if a similar audacity “to defect from the culture of enmity” was at the core of Paul’s Damascus experience, which demobilized him as a “holy warrior”? Prior to Damascus, he had seen the churches as compromising national and religious loyalty in the face of perpetual gentile (including Roman) onslaught against Israel. Might his post-Damascus “world mission” be described as journeying into the foreign “war zones” of otherness, not to plant “Christianity” in opposition to Judaism or paganism but to convey the Good News of Christ (euangelizōmai auton en tois ethnesin, 1:16) that deconstructs enmity and establishes viable peace? If so, then “Damascus” today could be taken not simply to mean the birth but rather the rebirth of Christianity as a comprehensive movement toward reconciliation with the enemy-other as the core of one’s self-in-Christ.
Galatians 2:1–10: Peace Council at Jerusalem
THE TEXT IN ITS ANCIENT CONTEXT
After many years of journeying, it took a second revelation (apokalypsis, 2:2) to make Paul finally return to Jerusalem. He returns as someone other from whom he was before, seeking the consensus of the Jerusalem leaders regarding “the gospel that I proclaim among the Gentiles”—clearly an “other gospel” in their eyes. Paul brings two mismatched “brothers” along, the Jew Barnabas and the Greek Titus (2:1). The textual hints at the drama surrounding their visit are cryptic, but clear enough to understand the key issue: From the standpoint of the Jerusalemites, the uncircumcised Titus (2:3) and the new mode of gentile-Jewish community he embodies are an anomaly threatening the integrity of the Christ proclamation. Conflicts pop up instantaneously. Paul mentions false brothers, infiltration of his communities, spying (2:4)—but he also passionately reports that eventually Titus was not forced to be circumcised and the “truth of the gospel” was preserved (2:3–5). Finally, in a somewhat miraculous reversal, the Jerusalem leaders concede the legitimacy of Paul’s other gospel. Galatians 2:8–10 is a statement of groundbreaking importance: “On the contrary, when they saw that I had been entrusted with the gospel of the foreskin [euangelion tēs akrobystias], as Peter with the one of the circumcision [tēs peritomēs], … they gave to me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship [koinōnia] … Only that we remember the poor” (my translation). The “gospel of Christ” (1:7) is authorized in two different versions that are applicable to two different groups, previously divided by an insurmountable boundary: Jews and gentiles. The “truth of the gospel” (2:5) is not uniformity but pluriformity; it reconfigures difference from enmity toward community and commonality (koinōnia). Yet this transformation is not encoded in a dogmatic statement, nor through erasing diversity (the foreskin of the male gentiles), but through concrete bodily and material practices of sharing—a handshake of solidarity and the collection of money from the gentile communities for the poor in Jerusalem, which became Paul’s signature project.
THE TEXT IN THE INTERPRETIVE TRADITION
In line with the dominant reading, which sees in Galatians the appearance of a new unified and distinct phenomenon, Christianity, most translators and interpreters have eclipsed the notion of the “one” gospel of Christ being two different gospels. The phrases “gospel of the foreskin” and “gospel of the circumcision” were rendered as “gospel for the Gentiles” and “gospel for the Jews” by the majority of translations, thus acknowledging only the difference between the audiences, but not the differentness within the gospel itself. Indeed, Hans Dieter Betz went so far as to assume that the notion of the two gospels was essentially un-Pauline and “may very well [have] come from an underlying official statement” (Betz, 97, 82). Most striking is Marcion’s rendering in the second century, which simply omitted “gospel of the circumcision” from the text, as he saw it as an illicit compromise with outdated Jewish law-observance on Paul’s side; therefore also the term “community” in 2:9 and the reference to the collection as “remembering of the poor” were removed (Riches, 103). Once the Jerusalem agreement became a merely tactical concession and the diversity of foreskin and circumcision that Paul envisioned was erased into the foreskin-only uniformity of gentile Christianity, the concrete practices of “difference-management” that integrated the diverse body of Christ lost their foundational importance as well. Not surprisingly, the importance of the collection as a church-founding antipoverty campaign is usually played down as a theologically irrelevant “kind of philanthropic gesture” (Betz, 101), although Paul mentions it as a primary act of economic and spiritual community-building, not only in Gal. 2:10 but also in 1 Cor. 16:1–4; 2 Corinthians 8–9; and Rom. 15:25–32 (Georgi 1992; 2005; Wan 2000; Longenecker).
THE TEXT IN CONTEMPORARY DISCUSSION
Identifying the Jerusalem Council as the declaration of mutual acceptance (koinōnia) of formerly exclusive and hostile identities raises fascinating questions of unity and diversity in the early Jesus movement and today. Paul’s radically inclusive messianic praxis of reconciling the nonuniform bodies of foreskin (gentileness) and circumcision (Jewishness) through concrete practices of solidarity “in Christ” might challenge contemporary notions of a uniform Christianity, to be defined over and against Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, or atheism. What would it mean for Christians to think Christianity outside the binary opposition of self-versus-other that has shaped Christian theology and ecclesiology throughout the centuries? In the contemporary landscape, what might be new ways of embodying a sort of Christian “both/and” identity that might correspond to what Jared Garroway describes when he refers to Paul’s “Jew-Gentiles” (Garroway, 1–10)?
Paul Knitter is one of the leading voices in interreligious dialogue today. Formerly a Catholic priest, trained at Rome during the Second Vatican Council, he identifies himself as both a Christian and a Buddhist. For him, Christ remains central in his spiritual practice, but this doesn’t mean that Buddha is secondary. The Buddhist concept of the No-Self, for example, enabled him to understand Christ in a new way. Meditating on a regular basis, the traditional Christian practices of Eucharist, worship, and scriptural reflection have lost none of their importance for him. While he wants to share the message of the kingdom with non-Christians, he doesn’t necessarily aim at “converting” them; rather, he understands the living, resurrected Christ to urge him to find the presence of the Spirit in others. Knitter frames his interreligious creed in the provocative book title Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian. Might the discussion above suggest that Paul of Tarsus could have pointed to Titus with an equally border-transgressive claim: “Without the gentiles I couldn’t be a Jew true to Christ”? Does Paul’s model of a bridge-identity through rigorous deconstruction of self and other contain new impulses to peace-building practices in the interreligious arena today that need to be unearthed?
Galatians 2:11–21: Eating (Dis)orders at Antioch and Justification by Faith
THE TEXT IN ITS ANCIENT CONTEXT
The clash between Peter and Paul at Antioch was harsh and somewhat traumatic; again, concrete bodily markers and practices of community (koinōnia) were at stake. Jews including Peter had been eating together with the gentiles, but after the arrival of emissaries from James in Jerusalem, they withdrew from the common table “for fear of those from the circumcision.” Boundaries were then reinstalled, visible to everyone (2:11–14). Paul calls this a collective hypocrisy of Peter and the Antiochene Jews (synypekrithēsan) and is shocked that even his companion Barnabas, witness of the Jerusalem agreement, joined them.
As his rebuke of Peter seamlessly leads into an extended exposition of justification theology, Paul links the Antioch table crisis with the present circumcision conflict in Galatia. The separation that originally set “us,” Peter and Paul as “Jews by birth,” apart from “gentile sinners” is no longer valid because sin is on “our” side as well (2:15). Doesn’t Peter the Jew live like a gentile (i.e., as a sinner, too, betraying his Jewishness: 2:14)? It might well be that Paul here thinks in particular of the Roman order, which has made both Jews and gentiles/nations subservient to and compliant with global structures of injustice and power divinization, which from a radically Torah-based perspective is sin. In this situation, the whole hierarchical split between righteous selves and sinful others is made obsolete, no matter how carefully one tries to fulfill the requirements of Torah by doing “works of the law” (2:16). Paul fully concedes the challenge this commonality of both Jewish and gentile sin poses to the entire system of social categorization and distinction that provides status and recognition. The Antioch episode demonstrates how the temptation to “rebuild” the old, law-based divisions of “us” (righteous) versus “them” (sinful) is almost irresistible (2:17). Yet to actually put trust, or faith (pistis), in the righteousness of these new practices that reconfigure the relationship between self and other is what makes people just (or righteous) in their relations to both God and neighbor, according to Paul (2:16, 18).
This inevitably leads into social conflicts where these faith practices defy the required practices (erga = “works”) of the established law (nomos) and turn the messianic communities into transgressors and “sinners” (2:16–17). In first-century Roman Antioch, the “mixed” table community of circumcised and uncircumcised, under the auspices of Jesus as Messiah, probably represented a political anomaly bordering on civil disobedience. It meant practicing an alternative oikoumenē among the conquered nations that acknowledged, not the triumphant Caesar, but his lawfully executed convict as supreme peacemaker, Lord, lawgiver, and divine presence. Since certain exemptions from the expectation of worship and subservience to Caesar were granted to Jews alone, Paul’s Jewish antagonists in Antioch may well have been troubled by the blurring of boundaries as non-Jews joined with Jews at the common table. Would they be seen as inciting non-Jews to withdraw from normal civic honors to the emperor? Did they consequently either plead to avoid the common table (2:12) or seek to impose circumcision on the non-Jewish believers (2:14) as an “evasive action” to establish some minimal compliance with law and order (Winter, 141–42; Nanos, 257–71; Kahl 2011, 219–22)? Either explanation might make clearer the connection between the situation in Antioch and subsequent events in Galatia.
For Paul, this going back to “works of the law” means “nullifying” the grace of God and the crucifixion event (2:21)—a collective “hypocrisy” (2:13) that claims as Torah-obedience what, in fact, is subservience to Caesar’s law, which has “hijacked” Torah. Jews and gentiles alike, formerly justified or unjustifiable by the criterion of law, are now together justified by Christ-faith, thus forging a new type of coequal community in tension with the established law of “divide and rule” that perpetually outlaws the other. There is no going back. Rather, the self has to accept its “death to the law” as death to itself, in an act of co-crucifixion with Christ that leads to an entirely new mode of life (2:19–20). Sin is overcome, not by law-works that set each one apart from the other, but by love-works of self-giving for the other that are embodied in Christ. This is the core of God’s grace and of Paul’s justification apart from the law (2:21).
THE TEXT IN THE INTERPRETIVE TRADITION
One of the most perennial problems around Gal. 2:15–21 has been the theological split that detached the Protestant emphasis on justification by faith as core doctrine from the circumstances of the Antiochene incident itself. Paul’s grand community manifesto was long read as an abstract theological declaration, without its concrete scriptural context. “Faith” became reduced to its vertical and personal component, as the individual act of belief “alone,” while its horizontal and social dimension was eclipsed and often disqualified as “works of the law.” The “dogmatic” and “conservative” Paul became the antagonist of the socially involved, liberating practice of Jesus. The seeming indifference of justification theology toward ethics led many Christians to question its theological relevance or to sidestep it as a “subsidiary crater” of Paul’s theology (Schweitzer, 225). The following insights provided the decisive turning points in these debates: first, the Greek genitive pistis Christou could be translated either as “faith in Christ” or “faith of Christ,” that is, pointing to the model faithfulness and obedience of Jesus (Hays); second, “works of the law” in Paul might not mean meritorious “good deeds,” but rather exclusivist and boundary-marking practices to maintain a distinct status (Dunn, 140); third, “law” is not simply Torah but can also imply nomos in a more general sense, including Roman and civic nomos (Taubes, 24; Georgi 1997, 153); and, fourth, nomos can also be defined in terms of competition for honor and status (Jewett, 298), or of antithetical binaries (Martyn 1997, 406), or of the hierarchical antagonism between a dominant self and an inferior other (Kahl 2010, 23).
THE TEXT IN CONTEMPORARY DISCUSSION
“Law” in this latter perspective is the normative order that systemically negates the worth of countless people on a global and local scale by “ranking” them, based on their economic or social status, their gender, ethnicity, religion, education, bodily (dis)ability, age, or other criteria. The poor, black, Hispanic, immigrant, indigenous, old, or underachieving part of humanity is disqualified as the loser and “undeserving,” becoming dispensable or even disposable. Feminist liberation theologian Elsa Tamez, from Costa Rica, sees this “logic of alienation” and “out-casting” as the primary economic and social context for efforts to retrieve the transformative power of justification by grace and faith for today, efforts that mean affirming the humanity and dignity of those treated as “human trash.” For Tamez, as for the Argentinian Néstor Oscar Míguez, the most powerful present-day embodiment of the “law” as an order of exclusion is the “law of competition” that is imposed globally by the neoliberal market economy and that justifies boundless self-interest and greed. “Sin” in this perspective is both personal and structural evil; it applies to us simultaneously as accomplices and as victims of injustice. Justification is inseparable from justice, opening a new logic of life and empowerment. It requires not only the renunciation of self-aggrandizement on the part of those in power but also the cessation of self-denigration on the part of those who see their marginalization as inevitable, natural, or God-willed punishment for their sin.
Galatians 3:1–29: “Queering” the Human Family
THE TEXT IN ITS ANCIENT CONTEXT
The principal topic of Galatians 3, with 3:28 as its climactic statement, is the “genealogy” of the ekklēsia as messianic commonality that dismantles and reconfigures all established self- constructs emerging from exclusivist, hierarchical identity markers—like nation, race, class, or gender. The chapter starts with another angry rebuke of the Galatians. They have lost their messianic clear-sightedness for the meaning of “Christ crucified” and have gone back to “works of the law” (3:1–5). If this means Christ-believing gentiles accepting circumcision to make them less prone to accusations of civil disobedience (compare the discussion of 2:11–21 above), Paul sees this seemingly Torah-based “accommodation” as entirely anti-Jewish.
Already in Gen. 12:3, the “proto-gospel” (proeuēngelisato, 3:8) had declared the Jewish progenitor Abraham as the future “body” incorporating God’s transethnic blessing for every nation and tribe. One singular “seed” alone (spermati, henos) is carrying what might metaphorically be called the “genetic information” needed to generate this exceptional body of a collective self in communion with the other—“who is Christ [Messiah]” (3:16). This unique messianic seed was activated through the event of crucifixion and God’s life-giving act of resurrection that claims life “out of the dead” (1:1; 3:13–14). The resurrected divine Son embodies God’s universal fatherhood by granting new life in his own body to all those living in the shadow of Roman crosses, and a new identity as children of God and seed of Abraham. Becoming “one in Christ Jesus,” Jews and non-Jews together are made heirs to Abraham’s promise of a blessing that is color-blind, status-blind, and gender-blind (3:26–29).
The theological backbone of Paul’s argument is a discourse of law and oneness that draws on the oneness of God as core-commandment of Torah (Exod. 20:1–5; Deut. 6:4). Oneness in the Messiah (3:28), however, is not the absence of diversity, but the contestation of an enslaving uniformity imposed by Caesar as the supreme “mediator” of the law, including Torah. Through his power to grant or revoke Jewish privileges, among them the privilege of nonparticipation in imperial cult, the emperor can bend Torah into a hybrid misrepresentation of God’s will and oneness (3:19–20; Kahl 2010, 227). Although Rome did not suppress religious (including Jewish) diversity per se, it “united” all conquered nations and religions in a collective submission that prominently featured worship of Caesar as the one lord, God, son of God, and father in a kind of “imperial monotheism”—a horrendously idolatrous practice and anathema, from a Jewish perspective (Kahl 2010, 138–44). Despite their exemption from the expectation of emperor religion proper, Jews had to make every effort to show their subservience to and reverence for Caesar in other ways. However, accepting uncircumcised non-Jews who didn’t worship Caesar, like Paul’s messianic gentiles in Galatia, might have easily looked like making Judaism a hotbed of rebellion against Rome (Winter, 141–42; Nanos, 257–71). Ultimately, it was Caesar as “mediator of the law” (3:19) who determined that Paul’s interpretation of Torah was “lawless.”
“The mediator is not of the one [henous ouk estin], but God is one [heis estin],” Paul counters (3:20). His model of oneness radically challenges a construct of God and humanity that unifies the worldwide imperial “family” of the nations through oppressive imperial patriarchy and the idolatrous divinization of power. Contrariwise, the messianic family is derived from the (pro)creative power of a “seed” that generates life “out of the dead” (1:1) and is thus resistant to the dehumanizing, consent-producing power of Roman crosses. Baptism means reincorporation, through the generative power of the messianic “seed,” that ends any form of patriarchal lineage. Humanity is no longer segregated into descendants of “our clan” or “their clan,” highborn or lowborn, rich or poor fathers—or the absence of “documented” fathers altogether. In Paul’s vision, the old, ghettoized self vanishes as humans are “reclothed” as new human beings in Christ: children of God and of Abraham, but siblings to one another and to Christ without any human father present, in this all-inclusive community where there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female, “for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (3:26–28).
THE TEXT IN THE INTERPRETIVE TRADITION
As the climactic summary of Galatians 3, Paul’s words in 3:26–28 constitute one of his most influential and controversial statements. There is a broad consensus that it originated from a pre-Pauline baptismal tradition, as attested elsewhere (1 Cor. 12:13; Col. 3:9–11; 2 Clem. 12.2; Gos. Thom. 22; Gospel of the Egyptians 3.91; MacDonald). Its egalitarian implications, however, are matters of much debate. Does the “baptismal formula” mainly attest to emancipatory practices in the congregations prior to and at odds with Paul (Schüssler Fiorenza 1985, 208–11; Briggs)? Or is it exemplary of Paul’s fear and erasure of difference in terms of “repressive sameness” or “coercive universalism” (Boyarin 1994, 234–35; Castelli, 124)? Would the baptismal oneness chiefly point to a future eschatological entity or a secluded spiritual reality “in Christ,” without real-life implications, as much of the interpretational tradition has implicitly assumed? Is therefore the demand of subordination for women, children, slaves, and political subjects elsewhere in the (deutero-)Pauline letters (e.g., Eph. 5:21–6:9) compatible with Gal. 3:28; or, contrariwise, is the demand of subordination the “canonical betrayal” of Paul, that is, his conservative “gentrification” (N. Elliott 1994, 25–54)? In terms of “male and female,” would Paul’s oneness formula imply a primordial androgyny (Meeks), or the critique of the order of marriage and procreation (Schüssler Fiorenza 1985, 211), or might it rather signal severe “gender trouble” in Galatia due to Paul’s deconstruction of dominant masculinity paradigms that were linked to circumcision as an established marker not just of Jewishness but also of maleness? (Kahl 1999; 2000; Wiley; cf. Lieu).
THE TEXT IN CONTEMPORARY DISCUSSION
How might Paul’s baptismal oneness of Gal. 3:28 translate into today’s society that is no longer split into “Jew” or “Greek/gentile,” but into black and white, poor and rich, aliens and citizens, inmates and free people? Around eight million people in the United States are presently incarcerated, on probation, or on parole. Compared to the overall population, this is not only by far the largest number in any country of the world but also includes a disproportionally high number of poor people, African Americans, and immigrants. Two key markers of Gal. 3:28—race/ethnicity and social location in terms of class, the lingering heritage of slavery, and immigration status—are involved in creating a hierarchical division of society that separates “us” as the law-abiding citizens, preferably perceived as white, from “them” who are the righteously incarcerated lawbreakers: dangerous and dark “others.” According to Mark Taylor, a part of the “surplus population” needs to be sacrificed to keep the others complacent and under control, and this sacrifice is enacted by a theatrical spectacle of control that keeps viewers both in fear and fascinated by state power (Taylor, 49, 60, 105–6; cf. Wacquant).
From Paul’s perspective, this status quo might look like another version of the dehumanizing and therefore godless imperial model of “divide and rule” he was confronted with in his own day. The waters of baptism for him have “drowned” this entire system, washing away the distinction markers that give “us” (the nonimprisoned) a sense of self-righteousness and legitimate superiority, which is derived from the existence of unrighteous others: This is how for Bob Ekblad the Pauline theology of justification by faith rather than through works of the law starts to develop its transformative power. Ekblad reads Paul, including Galatians 3, with people in jail, in particular with undocumented immigrants at the US-Mexican border who know all too well the “curse of the law” (Gal. 3:10) that perpetually condemns them as illegal. For him, Jesus is the “Good Coyote” who crosses people over the border into the kingdom of God, against the law, despite the law. “In the waters of baptism into Jesus’ death and resurrection the borders are brought down, and there are no longer distinctions between the law-abiding and criminal, US citizens and foreigners, legals and illegals, brown and white, chemically dependent and clean and sober, poor and rich, male and female—all are one in Christ.… We’re all wetbacks, and must even count ourselves as fellow ‘criminal aliens’ ” (Ekblad, 192).
Galatians 4:1–31: Mother Paul: Giving Birth to Messianic Solidarity
THE TEXT IN ITS ANCIENT CONTEXT
In chapter 4, Paul continues the messianic reconfiguration of family, genealogy, and identity. Consistent with the nonpatriarchal messianic “seed logic” of his midrashic discussion in Galatians 3, female concepts of mothering and birth-giving start to invade Paul’s language with surprising consistency, making its gender dichotomies porous all throughout—most strikingly in Paul’s “unmanly” depictions of himself as an inglorious missionary and a birth-giving mother in labor pains (4:12–20). In the subsequent allegory of the two competing archmothers (4:21–31), it is no longer Abraham’s biological fatherhood, but an exclusively female differential—paradoxically spelled out as the “barren motherhood” of a childless and abandoned woman (4:27; Isa. 54:1)—that defines kinship and belonging, including citizenship in the metropolis (“mother city”) of Jerusalem “above” (4:26, 31).
This highly irregular family construct is introduced in the opening section (4:1–7) by a strong appeal to “come of age” as children of God who recognize their adoption into an entirely new kin group, a transition tantamount to redemption from slavery. Collectively invoking God as Abba-Father (4:6), Paul says, “we” transition from slaves or minors to God’s children (4:1). This change in legal status is achieved through God’s Son, “born by a woman” and “under the law.” His lawful death and his law-defying resurrection deflects the force of the law that defines people on the one hand as either Jew or Greek/gentile/Roman, and on the other as subservient/slaves to Rome, which in the common Roman perception “naturally” entails feminization and demasculinization (Lopez, 26–54). Persons are no longer confined by these attributions, nor by the codes of behavior (including circumcision) they entail. Rather, they are redeemed, that is, “bought out” (exagorazein), from “under the law” and its legal grip on their allegiance, conduct, and perception of themselves as opposed to others (4:4–5). It is noteworthy that in 4:1–7, “law” is equated with the “elemental spirits of the world” (stoicheia tou kosmou), which according to Martyn (1997, 393–406) are the (binary) “pairs of opposites” that antithetically constitute the cosmos as its basic building blocks and function as universal agents of enslavement for both Jews and gentiles (“us”: 4:3, 5). This is strong evidence of the peculiar hybridity in Paul’s law terminology, which excludes any clear alignment of nomos with Torah alone and rather points toward the worldwide governance through Roman law.
In 4:8–10, Paul admonishes the Galatians (“you”) not to step back into their prior enslavement and underage status by resubscribing to the former gods that are “non-Gods.” Recent scholarship has pointed out that in this passage Paul’s antithetical stance against imperial religion, rather than Judaism and paganism in general, surfaces most visibly (Hardin, 116–47). The imperial gods that have co-opted all other civic deities are present among Roman subjects in a ceaseless sequence of “special days, and months, and seasons, and years” (4:10). These observances throughout the calendar year define civic time and space through a never-ending flurry of public festivals, processions, sacrifices, concerts, meals, benefactions, and rituals of all kinds (Mitchell 1993b, 10). Returning to at least minimal forms of participation on the side of the Galatians would restore political conformity as a matter of prudence; otherwise, they might imagine that they should take on a fully Jewish status through circumcision and thus hope to be excused from civic worship, as were the Jews.
Paul disagrees passionately. Rather than blending into the imperial oikoumenē of the imperial father and god on Caesar’s terms, he tries to realign the Galatians with the generative body of Christ that brought them forth in the new shape of a humanity no longer split into two; that is, to disalign them from the destructive and all-devouring law of competition, combat, conquest that he sees embodied in the imperial idols who all claim falsely to be gods (4:8). His description of the birthing process that brought forth the new messianic (Christ-)identity among the Galatians and of the birth labors he himself is again enduring on their behalf (3:19) is one of the most moving passages in Paul’s letters. He reminds the Galatians of their initial encounter, when they practically picked him up from the garbage pile of “human trash”—the embodiment of otherness in its plainest shape, as disposable and despicable nothingness (exoutheneō, “despise, regard as nothing,” 4:14; cf. 1 Cor. 1:28). Yet it was precisely in this solidarity with the destitute human other, stripped of all human dignity, that the Galatians accepted the Messiah, the embodiment of an alternative world order (cf. Matt. 13:31–46). It is to this shape (morphē) of humanity as one alongside or in solidarity with another that Paul tries to rebirth his converts in his messianic labor pains (ōdinō): “My children with whom I am again in the pain of childbirth until Christ is formed [morphōthē] in you” (4:19).
It is only in this overall logic that the concluding passage (4:21–31) makes sense. All depends on taking seriously Paul’s clues demanding a strictly “allegorical” and coded reading of “Hagar.” Hagar is not a “real” woman, nor is she identical with her counterpart in Genesis 16 and 21. Rather, she represents what Paul “allegorically” attaches to her as a “correspondence” (allegoroumenos, systoichei): the blasphemous cooptation of the exodus-Torah (“Mount Sinai”), by the Roman law of colonial slavery, including the compliant birth of children into the enslaving master order as its subjects and soldiers (4:24–25). What Paul wants to “drive out” (ekbale, 4:30) is not Hagar the slave woman as a person, but on the contrary, “Hagar” as the mental and social imprint of Roman slavery on Jewish practices and mind-sets in Paul’s time that she allegorically embodies as “Jerusalem now” (4:25). Hagar stands for the deceptive self-perception of those whom the Roman “father” claims as slaves, in continuous appellation to them as either his “children” or as subservient females who give birth to these children. The metaphorical Hagar’s son, similar to the pre-Damascus Paul and the Antiochene Peter, personifies an enslaved body using aggressive self-assertion (ediōken, 4:29; 1:13; anagkazeis, 2:14) against other enslaved bodies. This delusional practice of “freedom” makes the conquered violently reenact against each other the law of conquest and combat that continues to enslave them all.
Hagar’s allegorical counterpart is the “free woman.” She is “our mother” (4:26)—the new body of one-with-another (3:28) that is generated out of “barren mothers” (like Paul), through the generative power of the messianic seed (3:16) and Abraham’s transethnic blessing (3:8). This whole genealogical/birth narrative strongly draws on the theological deep structures of the Genesis accounts, with their entirely irregular construction of birthrights for second-born sons in opposition to existing patriarchal law. It brings all those parents not capable of bringing forth “proper” children together with all “other” children of God whom the law doesn’t entitle to their share of the “inheritance” (4:31). Together, “we” are children of the promise like Isaac, citizens of the “Jerusalem above” as universal metropolis of peace and freedom (4:26). Yet “our” messianic reaffiliation requires clear dissociation (4:30) from the forces represented by “Hagar”: forces that maintain the self-destructive and fratricidal binaries opposing “self” to “other” (Kahl 2004; 2013; Lopez, 153–63).
THE TEXT IN THE INTERPRETIVE TRADITION
One of the biggest interpretational liabilities of Galatians has been the binary reading that took the Hagar allegory as a “proof text” for a violent and supersessionist Christian disalignment from the other of Judaism. This polarity is famously depicted in the defeated and blindfolded female body of the “Synagogue,” opposed by the triumphant woman “Ecclesia,” in many churches in Europe. In line with Genesis 16 and 21, Gal. 4:21–31 has been read as another “text of terror” (Trible) that canonized the “legitimate” oppression and exclusion of Hagar not only as “Jew” but also as the abused and traded woman, the exploited African American (sex) slave, the single mother, the disposable foreigner (Williams 1993; 2006; Briggs, 224). Furthermore, the equally relentless stance of Gal. 4:30 against Hagar’s son Ishmael, who was according to Qur’an 2:121 the cofounder of the Kaaba in Mecca, could very well preconfigure contemporary anti-Islamism (Hassan). Without a Roman “reading lens,” the harsh verdict against Hagar can indeed all too easily change into the epitome of Christian anti-Judaism, patriarchy, xenophobia, and “kyriarchal” social master codes as they are commonly attributed to Paul (Schüssler Fiorenza 1999, 163–65).
THE TEXT IN CONTEMPORARY DISCUSSION
As a theological text, Galatians 4 is strikingly concrete in talking about able and defective human bodies. When the Galatians received and restored the weak, perhaps disfigured body of Paul as if he were Christ (hōs Christon Iēsoun, 4:14), rather than “spitting” (exeptysate) at him, they themselves became the “seed” (3:16) of the Messiah in his disabled and reenabled shape, as crucified and resurrected (4:12–15). This “form” and body of Christ is now in danger of being aborted (4:19) under the censorship of “standard” expectations regarding circumcised and noncircumcised bodies.
The pressure of normative body images in our contemporary society is strongly felt by people who don’t conform to established standards of “ability.” Bioethicist Adrienne Asch (1947–2013) was a pioneer in feminist disability studies who passionately spoke against prenatal testing as a means to detect disabilities in unborn children and terminate those pregnancies. Blind all her life and a passionate pro-choice advocate, she nonetheless strongly condemned such targeted abortions, arguing that life with disabilities was not “worthless” life (Parens and Asch). That might strongly resonate with Paul, who himself experienced the life-giving power of the messianic “seed” (3:16) in Galatia as a disabled, perhaps (vision)-impaired (cf. 4:15) missionary who received solidarity—and as the birth-giving mother of a human shape accused of being an intolerable misfit (4:12–20). His theology of the “body of Christ” suggests the integration (not necessarily the “mending”) of broken and non-normative bodies in a healing, supportive community where they can thrive in their diversity. Could Paul’s expulsion of the metaphorical body of “Hagar” be read, in a contemporary version, as the exorcism of compulsive, self-destructive (body) images of perfection and “normalcy” that we impose on ourselves and others? This “law” of accomplishment keeps people enslaved to the established master order by instilling constant anxiety, competition, and relentless “persecution” (cf. Gal. 4:29) of imperfection, in a never-ending race toward adequate performance and conformity. Ultimately, the “stigmatization of disability drives power mechanisms of capitalism” (Tataryn and Truchan-Tataryn, 14; cf. Isherwood).
THE TEXT IN ITS ANCIENT CONTEXT
The last section of Galatians shifts the emphasis to the concrete conflicts in Galatia. For the first time, the pressure to be circumcised is actually made explicit (5:3, 11; 6:11). And in candid language, Paul addresses issues of ethical norms and community rules that specifically target divisive behavior like “biting and devouring one another” or “competing against one another, envying one another” (5:15, 26). The catalog of vices and virtues in 5:19–23, though using a conventional pattern of ancient moral discourse, nonetheless is specifically tailored toward internal strife as signaled in eight out of the fifteen vices listed: enmity, rivalry, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy. All of these for Paul reflect an inflated sense of self-entitlement that damages the relationship between oneself and the other.
In contrast, love is the first item in the list of virtues. These all uniformly emphasize community-building “fruits of the spirit” like joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control (5:22). The term “one another” (allēlōn), derived from allos-allos (“other-other”), occurs no less than seven times in the brief section (5:13–6:2), pointing to the messianic movement from self-against-other to self-with-another that dissolves all binaries and divisions. The “law of Christ” is to “bear one another’s burdens” (6:2); this fulfills Torah, which is “summed up” (peplērōthei) in the one commandment of Lev. 19:18 to love your neighbor as yourself (Gal. 5:14). In all these ethical admonitions, “faith that ‘works’ through love” (energoumenē, 5:6) is the key concept: the indicative, that is, the Christ-reality of a new life “through the spirit,” is inseparable from the imperative of “walking according to the norm of the spirit” (5:25).
“Spirit” in this context is the opposite of “flesh.” The antithesis “spirit versus flesh” first came up in 3:2–3, together with the juxtaposition “works of power” or “faith” versus “works of the law” (3:5); it structures the whole passage, alongside the parallel polarity of “freedom versus slavery.” The spirit-engendered life in conformity with the law of Christ/Spirit embodies the “freedom” of the Galatians to withdraw from their slavish allegiance to the dominant law. Chapter 5 starts with a passionate plea that the Galatians “stand firm” in their freedom and not “submit again to a yoke of slavery” (5:1). Slavery was linked to the allegorical Hagar and the flesh in the preceding passage—and to the imperial law of divisiveness and submission that Paul sees creeping up in the circumcision conflict as well as in other internal combats and competitions.
Does this strongly antithetical structure in fact reinscribe the old dichotomies as structuring principle and basic building blocks of the cosmos (stoicheia tou kosmou, cf. 4:3, 9)? Is the assertion of freedom for ourselves on its underside inevitably the affirmation of slavery for others? These are valid questions. Paul dispels them with a carefully worded paradox: Messianic freedom is enacted as mutual slavery. It is not the unrestricted pursuit of self-interest from a master position as licensed by imperial law; rather, it is that law’s perpetual subversion by “serving as slaves (douleuete) to one another through love” (5:13). Unlike manumission by civic and imperial law, Christ-freedom thus is the undoing of slavery rather than its tacit reinscription as licit.
What if a member of the congregation fails to live according to the law of love? How should the community respond, without the backup of established law, “if anyone is detected in a transgression” (6:1)? One might think that at this point, finally, a strong hand is needed to restore order and accountability. Yet in the final section (6:1–10), Paul carefully avoids the recourse to any hierarchical authority (including his own) that judges, sanctions, and corrects misbehavior. Judgment and setting things right is strictly mutualized as task of the spirit-guided (pneumatikoi, 6:1) community. Any transgressor must be held accountable indeed, but in a “spirit of meekness.” Mindfulness of the judge’s own fallibility has to counterbalance the constant temptation to reestablish oneself in a master position over and against a sinful other (6:1). The “law of Christ” is not fulfilled through sanctioning the other’s lapses, but through “bear[ing] one another’s burdens” (6:2).
Paul here seems to be concerned about the judges more than the transgressor. The urge of the self to display its own righteousness before the dark foil of another’s offenses is sarcastically derided: After examining their own works, those who want to be important (but are not) should acclaim their merits strictly to themselves alone (pros seauton monon, 6:4). They should avoid the sort of “competitive boasting” (Jewett, 296) that reproduces the whole falsehood and deception (phrenapatā, 6:3) of social status, distinction, and superiority. God is the only judge, and only in the final judgment will each one have to carry their “own burdens” (6:5). Yet investing one’s life into the “Spirit” by “working for the good of all” (6:10) will reliably bring forth eternal life, whereas “sowing into the flesh” of self-obsession (and circumcision) will engender the harvest of death (6:8).
At the end, Paul adds a postscript in his own “large letters” (6:11–18). Circumcision in Galatia does not mean what it ordinarily does, namely, a seal of Jewish allegiance; its advocates are not really concerned about Torah (6:13). Rather, the “persecution” that they fear from the outside enforces the pressures to conform to established norms and identity markers (6:12; Winter, 123–43; Hardin, 85–115). At this point, Paul makes a final declaration: It is exactly this death-dealing conformity to a commonly accepted world order (kosmos) of divisive binaries that is dead through the cross. The universal logic that breeds violence, war, and subjugation, while claiming to be without alternative, has been deactivated. Paul is “crucified to the old kosmos” and the old kosmos to him (6:14). Yet the power of the resurrection emerges as the life-giving manifestations of the “new creation.” It is not yet fully present, but tangible reality wherever the old antitheses of self versus other, or circumcision versus foreskin, are invalidated (6:15). This is the “canon” of peace and mercy (6:16). It continuously dissolves enmity and polarity (which continuously keep building up again) within a community practice of dynamic mutuality and peace-building propelled by the transformative power of the Spirit and “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ/Messiah” (6:18). With this concluding testimony framed as a farewell greeting to his Galatian brothers and sisters followed by a final “Amen,” Paul summarizes and closes his letter.
THE TEXT IN THE INTERPRETIVE TRADITION
Rather than being understood as the climax of Galatians, Paul’s condensed reflection about love and community practice in Galatians 5–6 has often been disavowed as a mere afterthought to the letter, as it was seen as being in tension with its main theological thrust of “faith (alone)” versus “works” (see Barclay, 7–16). The question of how Paul’s theology and ethics are related has been widely debated, including the complex issue of “indicative” and “imperative”—that is, the paradoxical relationship between justification as the state of already achieved freedom from sin on the one hand and the demand to actively “work” against sin in line with faith, love, and Spirit on the other, as expressed in Gal. 5:1, 5–6, 25 (Horrell, 10–15). Another disputed topic has been the opposition of “flesh” (sarx) versus “spirit” (pneuma). The term “flesh” was often falsely identified as the inferior and sinful materiality of the human body, specifically with regard to sexuality. On the opposite side, “spirit” came to be understood as the superior and immaterial sphere of the “soul” and of “spiritual discernment,” defined in entirely individualistic categories. Instead, as has been rightly stated, “flesh” in Paul stands for the “radical inclination to self-centeredness,” in conjunction with the general biblical notion of flesh as the sphere of sin, that is, “human existence [seen] from the aspect of its being hostile to God and other human beings because it is essentially turned in on self” (Byrne, 45).
THE TEXT IN CONTEMPORARY DISCUSSION
Galatians as Paul’s probably most consequential letter has been discussed from a variety of perspectives, but rarely in light of the current ecological crisis. While the phenomenon of a global, life-threatening devastation of the earth’s habitat didn’t exist yet in the ancient world, and Paul certainly was not a “green” theologian, one might rightly ask whether the cosmic scope of his antidualistic thinking and the strong concern for the social, religious, and cultural other as key signatures of his messianic theology might have implications for the nonhuman other of nature as well. Does the “new creation” (kainē ktisis) in Gal. 6:15 as a condensed statement of the messianic transformation refer to humans alone, or is the conversion of ourselves in relation to the other of earth, water, and air implied?
As the Sydney Morning Herald reported in June 2013, a church in Queensland, Australia, has twenty-four solar panels bolted to its roof in the shape of a Christian cross. And a mosque in Bursa, western Turkey, is projected to have a vertical-axis wind turbine (without the big revolving blades) installed on a minaret. Should one read the “solar cross” on a Christian church as a crude trivialization, a fad, a blasphemous persiflage on Paul’s august theology of the cross, or as one of its valid and urgent contemporary recontextualizations? The cross obviously features prominently all throughout Galatians, including the final handwritten postscript in 6:11–18. In 6:14–15, Paul boldly declares that he is crucified to the (old) kosmos and the kosmos to him, because the dichotomies on which the established world order (kosmos) rests (like the antithesis of circumcision/Jews versus foreskin/gentiles) have been dissolved and left behind. The cross thus opens up an ongoing transformation of self and other toward reconciliation and mutuality that clearly transcends the realm of humans. Paul is crucified to the entire kosmos with its multiple polarities, not just its faith-based, ethnic, and social divisions (Martyn 1985). Echoing the biblical creation accounts in Genesis 1–3 and Isa. 43:18–19; 65:17–25, the “new creation” in Gal. 6:15 that is born out of the cross, then, would be more than simply a new society or religion, it would rather comprise the entirety of the human and nonhuman world (Kahl 2010, 272–73).
The polar (dis)order that over the centuries has become formative for Western philosophy, theology, and civilization excludes and exploits not only the human other in terms of gender, race, religion, and class, but also the other of nature and earth. Paul’s radical regard for the other and his messianic model of a “corporate solidarity” in Christ, as perceptively outlined by David Horrell (274), for our time thus inevitably have an ecological dimension as well—for example, where our mutual interdependence within overarching ecosystems and the rights of nonhuman species need to be acknowledged (Horrell, Hunt, and Southgate, 190–94). “Greening” Paul and his theology of faith-justification is one of the most cutting-edge tasks ahead for Pauline interpretation. And maybe the “solar cross” and the “wind energy minaret” mentioned above could allow us to envision a nonbinary creation (Gal. 6:15) as the forging of new coalitions toward a universally sustainable connectivity across all kinds of religious and other boundaries that was as vital to Paul’s world as it is to ours.
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