516QuailMeadow: St. Paul, it’s been 1950 years since you wrote this letter to the little Christian community in the eastern part of the Roman Empire, and here we are, reading dead people’s mail! How did this become Scripture?
St. Paul: That happened a long time after I gave my life for the gospel in Rome. A lot of these little messianic communities of Jews and Gentiles gradually collected letters from me and Peter, James and John and copied them and traded them with each other. Over time, these churches had quite a collection and eventually they had to make some serious decisions about what was ‘in’ and what was ‘out’—in other words, what made the cut to be a part of the Bible and what didn’t!
516QuailMeadow: So how in the world does this ‘collection’ of letters and stories written by followers of Jesus--like you--function as God’s Word for us in 2009?
St. Paul: This is obviously a debated concept today in the Body of Christ. Some believe in what’s called the ‘dictation theory,’ that God actually breathed these words through writers like me—that the Spirit of God used me as an error-free instrument to say exactly what God was trying to say. Quite humbly, as a human—weak and imperfect—I can’t quite say that this is the case. I believe that God still uses saints like me and you to do his will, but I still think we’ve got very ‘human’ ideas throughout the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. The way I would define the authority of Scripture—how it functions as God’s Word to us—is that a community gathers around it and reads it and studies it and prayerfully interprets it together and then commits to living it. They place themselves under its authority like an actress with her script. The script guides the character by offering boundaries, but it also demands creativity and imagination as it is interpreted on stage or screen. There will be different interpretations, though, depending on the denomination/tradition of the church community, as well as the experience and the specific culture of the community. For instance, there have been many interpretations of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet over the centuries [some better than others] for catering to a diversity of audiences devoted to Shakespeare. The internet helps us to see, better than ever, that different Christian communities throughout the United States--let alone the entire world--interpret all of these biblical passages, including my letters, in a variety of ways. This doesn’t mean that just any old interpretation is valid. I think there are probably 2 or 3 valid interpretations of what the Spirit of God is saying through my words for any given passage. But seriously, there are all sorts of ideas floating around about what exactly I was saying to the Galatians!
516QuailMeadow: What exactly is the point that you were trying to get across to the Galatian Christians?
St. Paul: The birth of this community of Jews and Gentiles was really divine intervention, but the maturity of the community was a painstaking work-in-progress. Jews and Gentiles are ethnically very different. A group of Jewish Christians called aptly ‘the Judaizers’ influenced the Galatian church after I proclaimed the gospel to them and spent some time with them. What can I say: while the cat’s away the mice will play! The Judaizers demanded that Gentiles be circumcised in order to participate in the community. In essence, they were telling the Gentiles to become Jewish in order to be a part of God’s People. I dedicated most of my effort in this letter attempting to communicate the vital concept of what it means to be ‘in Christ.’ When we Christians have our conversion experience, when we become 'in Christ,' all of our identity markers are consumed by Christ. Our faith or better yet, faithfulness, becomes the crucial factor. But I do want to emphasize that Christians over the centuries—-especially since Martin Luther—-have overemphasized the salvific ‘status’ of individuals and the unintended consequence has been to de-emphasize what it means for the people of God to have a ‘vocation.’ Protestant Christians since Luther have really focused on faith [or belief] as a mental assent to certain doctrinal statements like ‘Jesus is my Lord and Savior’ or ‘Our eternal salvation in heaven comes from grace not works.’ These statements are not bad or wrong as simple statements, but they have kept Christians from understanding what I was attempting to challenge these Galatians with. The basic unsaid assumptions working behind the scenes of this letter are that, as the people of God, we have our work cut out for us. Our faith in Christ, of course, must translate into action—-or it’s not really faith at all. Action starts by understanding that the death of Jesus—-echoing the first Passover for Jews—-liberates us from being enslaved to the mentality of the ‘present evil age.’ I also use language like the ‘flesh’ and the ‘world’ for this same concept. Christians are those who participate in the death of Christ [‘I have been crucified with Christ…the world has been crucified to me and I to the world’] so that means that we are a part of a whole new world, a 'new creation' made possible by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. We have been liberated [‘freedom in Christ!’] to be citizens of the promised land [‘the age to come’] having the subversive mentality of the kingdom of God even though it will not fully arrive until Jesus returns in glory. As liberated followers of Jesus, we bear the fruit of the Spirit now. Peace, love, kindness, gentleness, self-control overflow from our lives, sweetening the present evil age, as we anticipate ‘the age to come’ in its fullness.
516QuailMeadow: How does all of this translate to the issue at hand: circumcision?
St. Paul: Circumcision was a hangover from the ‘present evil age.’ It was a powerful identity marker for the Jewish people, a symbol of their covenant with the living God. It represented an ethnic way of thinking about God and what it meant to follow him. Circumcision was an issue that kept the Galatians from fully understanding the social implications of Jesus’ life and death. The people of God became an eclectic bunch of Christ-followers with unique customs, all of which were transcended by identification with the Messiah in baptism. Of course, now circumcision is completely irrelevant and is not an issue for most Christians in the States. But back then it was huge, a potential deal-breaker for many Jews and Gentiles alike. You can feel my passion and anger in this letter. I even tell this community they might as well emasculate themselves if they are thinking this way—some language for a saint, eh?!
Circumcision was a stumbling block for Gentile Christians because it was a cheap tool to fit in with Jewish Christians and non-Christians. These Gentiles wanted to walk in two worlds at the same time. The Judaizers convinced many of them, through fear and manipulation, to get circumcised. This, in effect, watered down the powerful message that God had expanded his reign to the non-Jewish world. For us Jews, this could only mean one thing: that God had accomplished, rather mysteriously, his promised return to Zion, the new covenant, pouring out his Spirit upon all flesh. This signaled an apocalypse, often translated as a ‘revelation’ in your English Bibles: the official unveiling of God’s mysterious plan for the world. These were exciting times in the decades after Jesus’ inauguration of the kingdom. God was keeping his people on the edge of their seat. To command non-Jews to get circumcised was back-pedaling into old ways.
516QuailMeadow: How does this seemingly ‘irrelevant’ issue become relevant to Christians living in Southern California today?
St. Paul: First of all, we have a lot of ethnic challenges in our world today. One of our lessons from Galatians is how we connect and worship with people who have different customs and lifestyles than us. I think about immigrants coming from the south [Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador] who work all these tough jobs like dishwashing and gardening, making less-than-minimum-wages. Many of these folks follow Jesus passionately, but it is rare to see them worshipping with the wealthier, mostly white, restaurant owners and home-owners that they work for. 40 years ago, Martin Luther King said that Sunday morning in the church was the most segregated hour in American life. There are some communities defying these odds, but not many.
In addition, I think about the variety of Christian denominations who exclude other Christian traditions based on certain worship practices, doctrines or daily customs. In American religious life, depending on geographic region, Christians often cling to rituals that are based more on human tradition than on what God ordains.
The big takeaway from Galatians, I think for Americans, is this big-picture concept pitting the ‘present evil age’ with the ‘age to come.’ To be a ‘Christian’ means quite simply that we pledge allegiance to living as a sign and foretaste of the ‘age to come.’ The Gospels, which came a good 2-3 decades after I wrote the letter to the Galatians, called this ‘the kingdom of God.’ In the first century, the Jews were awaiting God’s return to this world in a decisive manner. They thirsted God’s final triumph over the imperial empire of Rome. Only God could manhandle Caesar’s militaristic domination system. There were a lot of different types of Jewish communities [kind of like Christian denominations now] and each of these had a different idea about what true Jews should be doing until God comes back and how exactly God would come back. Pharisees, Saduccees, Zealots, Essenes, Herodians and Messianic Jews [or ‘Jews for Jesus’] all had their firm [yet diverse] convictions about what it meant to be God’s people. I was a Pharisee who ran into [literally] the risen Jesus on my road to Damascus where I was going to arrest and kill these subversive Jews for Jesus. On that road, I was confronted by Jesus and then converted to his ‘way,’ but most importantly I was commissioned, like the Prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah centuries earlier, to bring the message of Jesus the Lord and Messiah to the Gentiles all over the Roman Empire. After this confrontation, I was convinced that the long-awaited ‘age to come’ had been inaugurated in Jesus. It certainly did not happen how I expected it to and it was inaugurated partially, as a first stage in God’s end-times drama. Jesus will re-appear someday soon and commence the ‘age to come’ in its fullness, when every knee will bow to him. But until then, Christians live by a completely different set of rules than anyone else. This set of rules should never lead us to be triumphalistic or judgmental. Instead, the Body of Christ should be a rich harvest of the fruit of the Spirit. Remember, it’s a whole new world [‘new creation’] now that God has raised his son Jesus from the dead. Our symbol for this new world is the cross. We’ve crucified our ideas of ‘the way things are’ and now it’s all about faithfulness to Jesus’ way—-even if it doesn’t bring success as the world defines it. The pattern of death and then resurrection implies that it's about obedience, not effectiveness. As modern-day saint Martin Luther King used to say, 'The cross we bear precedes the crown we wear.'
516QuailMeadow: What does Jesus’ death mean for you?
St. Paul: First of all, let me just say that was by accident that I even spent any time with the Galatians at all. I was in a bad state physically and not only did they nurse me back to health, but they received my message of good news about Jesus with open arms. Back in the day, folks did not usually listen to a stricken prophet. A sickness or injury like this would have meant that God was not really with the messenger. But the Galatians seemed to understand that the ways of God were often mysterious. In the true story of his ‘anointed king’ Jesus, we really have a beautifully mysterious picture of how God actually works through the weak and condemned. Right there in Deuteronomy, the Torah [law] of God, it reads that any man who hangs from a tree is cursed! So God used this cursed one to be a curse for us so that we can all be reconciled back to God. God exchanges the curse of Jesus’ cross for the curse of our sin to cancel each other out! Jesus’ death was an exchange for Jews and Gentiles to be a part of the people of God. Gentiles had always been enemies of God’s way in the world—they were mostly foreign to what it meant to be truly human. Jesus’ death erased this curse. They have been given an opportunity to be a part of a new race of people that are a true blessing to the world. As God’s people from the time the Exodus until Jesus, the Jews were also a cursed people, consistently falling short of what it meant to be the light and salt of the world. Jesus’ death gave them, too, an opportunity to be a part of this new race—Jews + Gentiles—that would bless the world [again, back to the fruit of God’s Spirit].
But Jesus’ death means a lot more than that. I see it also as a mystical union with Messiah. I have to embrace Jesus’ death everyday to remind myself [and others] that I’m now living and breathing every moment as Jesus himself. But we followers of Jesus know that whatever is killed will be raised to newness of life. His faithfulness to God’s way is being lived out in me. There are all sorts of things that we should crucify in order to experience fullness of life and be God’s people. Identity markers like going to church on Sunday and which political party we vote for and the correct formula for taking the Lord’s Supper and the exact words we say in prayers and praying the once-and-for-all eternal insurance prayer for salvation—these and many others can be obstacles for experiencing the true identity and vocation of Christian faith.
516QuailMeadow: OK, let me quote you. In what is now called the second chapter of Galatians verse 16, you wrote: 'we know that a person is justified not by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ. And we have come to believe in Christ Jesus, so that we might be justified by faith in Christ, and not by doing the works of the law, because no one will be justified by the works of the law.' Interpret this for me. What are you doing here?
St. Paul: Since Luther, most European [and then American] Protestant Christians have interpreted this through Luther's grid of Catholic Church oppression. In his day, Luther proclaimed to the common peasants that we are reconciled to God not by good deeds and rituals, like church attendance and pricey indulgences, but instead through an act of faith in Jesus. You grew up Protestant so you learned that 'justified' means that God now views me 'just-if-I'd-never-sinned.' This is the meaning of Christ's death for Protestants. Theologians call it forensic justification or penal-substituationary atonement theory.
But remember why the letter to the Galatians was written: I was responding to the counterfeit gospel of coerced circumcision. The word 'justified' comes from the dikaios family of Greek words meaning 'righteous' or 'innocence,' referring to God's covenant faithfulness to his people. To be 'justified' was simply to gain full-membership into God's covenantal people, not only to have our sins wiped away to face an angry Protestant God. However, the Gentiles, according to my gospel of what God did through Christ, were fully members of God's people by the faithfulness of Christ. His life of obedience to the point of death become the paradigm and sacrifice to expand the margins of who was 'in.' In addition, the faithfulness of the Gentiles, not adherence to the Jewish law [torah], was how membership in God's new race of people was solidified. The unintended consequences of Luther's interpretation has been an overwhelming insistence that faith as mental assent or belief in Jesus as Lord and Savior--and not works--was what 'saved' individuals. This divorced faith from works, as well as the individual from the importance of the people of God [church or Body of Christ]. Allegiance to God's people and radical obedience have become after thoughts to getting personally saved for eternity and evangelizing all others into the same understanding. After all, Luther thought that James' letter [which also became part of the New Testament] was an 'epistle of straw' because James had the audacity to write that 'faith without works is dead.' James and I were on the same page. I was never fighting a 'works-righteous' salvation, where people apparently think that they can work their way to heaven. That wasn't on my radar. I had never dreamed of a 'faith' that wasn't radically about 'works.' I just wanted Gentiles to throw away those knives and experience the freedom and power in Christ!
516QuailMeadow: Do you think you’ve been misunderstood by Christians through the ages?
St. Paul: Look, interpreting someone’s words after hundreds and even thousands of years have past is a daunting task. Christian pastors and theologians have tried as best as they can over the years to interpret what I was saying to different church communities. Anytime sincere and faithful folks are trying to determine what the author meant by their words on paper there has to be humility. About a decade ago, Duke Professor Richard Hays proposed 3 ‘focal images’ to guide New Testament interpretation: community, cross and new creation. These images should illumine readings of my letters, the Gospels and all the other writings of the New Testament. The cross is a paradigm for the Christian lifestyle—a pattern of humility and social non-conformity. Community reminds us that all of these documents were written to groups of people pledged to the kingdom of God. Too many Western 21st century Christians read these words individualistically. We have to recover the notion that the church is the place where individual Christians work out the politics of Jesus—the practices of the kingdom that separate us from the counterfeit systems of the world that have naturally shaped us. Lastly, new creation signifies the audacious claim that we are living in ‘the age to come’ now. We anticipate the kingdom of God by living it now, no matter how hard and abrasive and ineffective that may be.
I think we should work as hard as we can in our communities to interpret the Bible with all the resources that we have available: our historical tools, understanding the Greek language, our own experiences, the research of contemporary sciences, deep prayer and fasting and a lot of dialogue. We should never have a relativistic attitude that we should just shrug our shoulders and give up because we don’t have access to absolute truth. Hays’ images can help us by acting as controls for interpretation and guides for our readings. People quote me all the time in regards to the legitimacy of slavery or how we should vote for laws regarding gays and lesbians or if women should be leaders in the church or if we should justify militaristic policies of the government or how we go about evangelizing certain people groups. I think Hays’ focal images are pretty helpful to guide these dialogues and set a goal to shoot for, but don’t get me wrong: I don’t think the images are a formula to guarantee absolute truth or certainty. Like I told the Corinthians 1950 years ago: ‘Now I know only in part,; then I will know fully, even a I have been fully known.’
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