Tonight, as the weight of other seminary assignments overwhelm me, the response I received for this paper has encouraged me to press on. It is very long, but it is the outcome of a great deal of work that has challenged what I thought I knew about the Gospel, Law, Grace, and the apostle Paul. I hope it is helpful to some:
The title of this blog is the summary at the very end. If you get bored, just skip to that paragraph.
I. Summary of Content
It is a biblical theme that the best way to judge something is to look at and partake of its fruit. While it seems that many evangelicals in the west, particularly those in North America, are scrambling to find out why much of our efforts are in fact fruitless, Baker has a proposition that forces us to step back and look at what the fruit of our theology has created in the rest of the world. Baker does this based on his assessment of the churches he worked with while in Honduras: “I asked what it was about the form of the gospel that North American missionaries like me brought Honduras that allowed these theological distortions to flourish (14).” He later goes on to say that the book will seek to observe what is happening in some Honduran churches in order to “help us identify weaknesses and distortions in the gospel North American evangelicals have brought to Honduras (15).”
Baker’s premise is that religion, as he defines it, is the culprit in our churches today. Religion, and the Western mind have caused us to read the bible through our own autonomous lenses. Baker believes that the key to interpreting scripture is to become aware of these lenses and begin the process of taking them off. The first four chapters of the book are committed to personal testimony of what is occurring in Honduras, and it is eerie the similarities that are found when one compares the two. Baker further expands his premise by likening North American theology to driving a car. While driving a car in normal conditions, the vehicle appears to operate fine, but “We dare not ignore the way this car performed on the Las Mesetas test course, because the ‘car’ used by the Las Mesetas churches was imported from North America. The rattling we have heard and the vibrations we have felt in this chapter have come from our car… (31).”
Baker defines religion as “line-drawing (36).” He later goes on to define “religiosity” as “our common human tendency to attempt through our efforts to gain security from God, the gods or something that acts as a god in our lives (37).” This definition harmoniously quantifies the alienation, misinterpretation and exclusion that manifests itself in this region of Central America. It also establishes the commentary that is to come on Galatians that characterizes a good percentage of the book.
As stated before, the enemy of interpretation which has become the fruit of North American export is the interpretive lens through which we have seen the book of Galatians in particular through “North American Individualism” (57-58). Baker observes that “built into this lens is the idea that future individual-salvation of the soul is the center of Christianity (57).” In this way, Baker challenges the traditional reformation understanding of the book of Galatians and utilizes some new perspective understandings to make these corrections.
Baker observes that the traditional understanding of the book of Galatians and the reason for its composition makes “no mention of Paul’s concern for the church as a community nor of Paul’s concern for the unity of the church in Galatia. Instead they (the traditional interpreters) claim that Paul wrote the letter so that individual Christians in Galatia would be free from legalism and understand the correct path of salvation (75).” Stemming from this interpretation, justification is “a process that involves only God and the individual (76).” The danger that Baker sees in this focus solely upon the individual’s salvation is that it opens up the door to the religious definition that he gave earlier to work in the community of believers. The emphasis becomes on what one must do to be saved, rather than what God has done in the transaction. This, Baker contends, leads to a host of ways in which a person can be judged in order to validate the legitimacy of their salvation.
The traditional understanding, Baker further goes on to explain, suggests that Paul’s purpose for writing was that the Judaizers (a term Baker only seems to use when talking about the “traditional understanding) “told the Galatians human merit was an integral part of salvation. Paul is upset by a doctrinal error in relation to the path of salvation for individuals (80).”
Baker begins his understanding of Galatians with a look at the exchange between Peter and Paul. For Baker, it is this exchange which demonstrates that Paul’s concern was division in the body, not doctrinal error. “For Paul the truth of the gospel is ‘there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus’ (3:28) (81).” When Baker begins to unpack the fact that the agitators were more than likely not preaching a gospel of merit, he challenges his readers to “reevaluate how much we have in common with the false teachers in Galatia (87).” For Baker then, the Galatian’s desire to place themselves under the authority of the law “could split the community and easily lead people to come under the bondage of religion (87).”
The faith in/faith of debate is key for Baker, and he leans heavily on a translation that emphasis the faith/faithfulness as Christ being the subjective genitive rather than the object. That is, the faithfulness of Christ’s actions is the emphasis, rather than the faith of the individual in Christ. Any deviation from this understanding and one is subject to the grips of religion once more: “Given the religious propensity of humans, a translation that encourages people to view faith itself as a work that achieves something is an unwise translation… People assume they need to do something to earn good standing with God. Paul would reject the ‘faith in’ translation because it carves out a space for human action, subtly taking a step back toward the slavery of religion (106).”
II. Critical Analysis
I found a great deal of validity to Bakers work and was excited when I started reading this book. The idea that we can objectively critique our own hermeneutic, the fruit of our own culture induced by interpretive postures through ways in which it has been manifest in places where we exported it to is brilliant. It can in fact be difficult to critique one’s own surrounding culture when one is in its midst. It is also difficult when prosperity and affluence are abundantly apart of the culture that has exported its theology. I would agree with Baker that at times, the ways in which theology has been practiced here is quite frightening. For example, when the Christians in Honduras believed that they must interpret the words “poor” to mean a spiritual poor, I knew exactly what Baker was getting at. Up until my trip to Cambodia, I did in fact utilize a spiritual hermeneutic whereby poverty meant something other than actual poverty. Instead, it meant spiritual poverty. One must interpret this way when one has never seen nor experienced poverty.
On an applicational level, I greatly appreciated Baker’s observations. I conclude that this makes Baker an excellent missional exegete in some regards. However, Baker proposed a hermeneutical lens of his own that I found, as is the case with all lenses, to be lacking in wholeness of understanding and self serving at times. When one proposes a hermeneutical key to understand scripture, they look for that key and make applications towards their premise. Some hermeneutical keys are valid, such as a Christotelic/Christocentric reading of the Old Testament. Baker’s imposition on the word “religion” made the conclusions that he drew, at times, either difficult to understand or appearing to be a stretch of the text and intent of the passages.
Baker covers many of the issues that we discussed in class or read about. He begins with E.P. Sanders, whom we have established through reading and discussion to be one of the first to contend that “Paul did not attack a Jewish teaching that humans earn their salvation by their own efforts. To say he did so is to hold an erroneous view of Judaism… The law did not provide a means to achieve fellowship with God… The Law showed Israel how to live in covenant with God… They did not teach that obeying the law was a means to earn salvation; obedience kept one within the covenant (84).”
Where I found Baker to be lacking is in the same area that I had to reconfigure what I thought I understood about Law versus Grace several times over while in class. When Baker interacts with “The Law,” he defines it not as the ethnic supreme identifier that I believe the agitators were preaching (that is, Torah, the first five books of the law; not a list of do’s and don’ts), but rather Bakers seems to see the law as a series of standards that define who is in and who is out, which is consistent with his premise of the negative effects of religion. While there is validity to this assessment, it does not seem to full satisfy and encompass Paul’s understanding of the Law.
Baker fears that it is the “Jewish laws and traditions” that were going to split the community in Galatia and “lead people to come under the bondage of religion (87).” I think this line of thought is affirmed by Hays while discussing the Stoicheia. In Galatians 4:8-11, Paul speaks of the “weak and beggarly elemental spirits (NRSV)?” Or as the NIV renders it: “…weak and miserable principles?” Concerning this Hays writes: “When one strips away the specific terminology of the Jewish festivals, Paul suggests, one sees that they are in essence just another kind of nature religion! He is saying, in effect, ‘You used to be in slavery to the cosmic elements; if you come under the Law, you will be back under the control of these same cosmic forces (Hays 288).’” While I believe for exegetical purposes Hays has narrowed his scope concerning Paul’s understanding of the Law to the passage at hand, this interpretation is difficult to reconcile with other passages (not that it is impossible to reconcile, just that I am having difficulty bringing them together).
The problem is that this interpretation does not seem to harmonize the paradoxical nature that Paul speaks about the law. Sloan does an excellent job of pointing out that Paul speaks of the law in both negative and positive ways, and any interpretation of Paul must reconcile the way in which Paul speaks about the Law in this manner. Sloan points out as well that “there can be little doubt that Paul still is referring to the one law which is, in spite of its attachment to sin and the flesh, nonetheless God’s law (Sloan 46).” With this statement Sloan affirms that the Law is referencing more than just a set of rules and principles, but also that the law remains an agent of God; a principle that one must consider when speaking about the Law.
There are other areas where I feel like Baker’s process of interpretation is going in the right direction, but his interpretive predisposition leads him to a bizarre conclusion. In fairness however I must note that Baker states that “By highlighting religion, I do not mean to imply that the term summarizes in a comprehensive way all that Paul discusses in this section (that section being Gal. 5:15-6:10) (132).” In this way it seems Baker acknowledges the limitations of his methods.
III. The issue of justification by faith
The issue of justification by faith took me by surprise when we began this course. The pivotal moment was while listening to the lecture on MP3 in sync with slide 54 of the first PowerPoint presentation. In it, was the “Surprising absence of some key terms and concepts from the earlier sections of the book: Faith, Works, Abraham, Justification.” The implication of this being that in the conclusion of his letter, Paul would draw together all that is central to his purposes for writing, and none of these seemingly foundational themes of Galatatians are present. This struck me in such a profound way, that I immediately had to blog about how “My mind had just been blown.” It was a long process of piecing all of the implications of this together. It was clearly stated, both in class and in much of our literature, that justification by faith was not wrong, it simply was not the theme of Paul’s letter. It just so happened that strolling into an English pub in Lancaster City, I met up with a man who wrote his dissertation on this very topic. I will speak more on that later.
First, I should like to articulate what I concluded very early concerning this phrase. Though reductionist in nature, I concluded that Luther was more preoccupied with the location of his own soul and had interpreted ancient Judaism as the then Roman Catholic Church that could not give Luther the absolution he labored towards yet never acquired. This certainly was Baker’s contention:
“SINCE LUTHER, MOST PROTESTANTS HAVE SEEN JUSTIFICATION, not by works of the law but by faith, as the central idea of Galatians. In the writings of Paul, Luther, a conscience smitten friar, had found freedom from his burden of guilt and his endless striving to achieve peace with God. He used Paul’s teaching of justification by faith as a corrective to the medieval church’s teaching on penance and indulgences – what Luther saw as justification by works. Luther’s experience has had a huge impact on the way we read Paul. Protestants have not had the image of the divided table at Antioch in mind when they read Galatians; rather, using the lens of Luther’s experience, they have commonly interpreted Paul as addressing the same issues; the individual’s burden of guilt and a mistaken teaching of works-righteousness… Luther’s experience was not wrong. Rather, it is wrong to use Luther’s experience as the sole interpretive key for the letter (97-98).”
This is a great summation, at least of Bakers stance. It does however; leave me wondering if it is not overstated. While out with Dr. Jim McGahey (who’s dissertation I later acquired), he explained that Luther was way too good a scholar to have so blindly missed what he is modernly being accused of. With this I remark that in the quote above, Baker’s statements seem contradictory; dismissive at first, then retractive later.
With this in mind I turn to Dr. James McGahey who writes: “But one may legitimately question whether, by this recognition, most proponents of the ‘new perspective’ have penetrated far enough into the bedrock of Paul’s theological argumentation. For by demanding the full proselytization of Gentile converts, the agitators implicitly denied the absolute and sole sufficiency of Christ’s atoning death to render them fully acceptable before God as members of his new covenant people (320).” This succinct statement affirms a diversity of opinions. I do not think that Dr. McGahey is denying the agitators desire to have Israel and her Messiah identify with Torah, and at the same time it is an affirmation that placing oneself under the Torah is a challenge to the supremacy of Christ, in which Torah has its fulfillment and has satisfied its purposes.
Longenecker affirms this by noting the polarity of argumentation: “On the one hand, some argue that the fundamental problem with observing the laws was, for Paul, ‘ethnocentrism,” in which God’s grace was thought to be restricted to a single national entity that observed the law… On the other hand, others argue that the law was inadequate for Paul due to its failure to correct an inner, deeply-seated spiritual problem at the very core of human identity…” Longenecker goes on to correct and harmonize this dichotomy by saying: “It is certainly true that the issue of ‘nomistic observance’ focuses on matters of social boundary markers and group identity which pertain to ethnic Israel. But it is also the case that Paul finds the ‘ethnocentric covenantalism’ of the agitators to be a full-blown example of something fundamentally wrong within the human condition (76).” In this way, Luther’s take away interpretation is affirmed as the condition of humanity is manifest in the law; and the cure for humanities condition is to be found in Christ. There are other areas however, where remnants of reformed theology must be challenged in regards to justification by faith.
In essence, when one challenges the premise upon which justification of faith is built and presented in its reformed context (that is that the law is presented as the perfect definer of sin and demanded perfect adherence, thereby Christ as the perfect law keeper imputes his righteousness [justification] upon us through our faith in him for keeping the law perfectly) the “traditional understanding of Galatians” as Baker would say, can no longer be substantiated. As Hays says: “his (Paul’s) point cannot be that the Law requires sinless perfection, for the Law contains extensive provisions to provide atonement and forgiveness of sins… The Law is a total way of life, a religious system that makes a total demand on one’s life. To come under the Law is to enter a sphere where the Law is sovereign.”
So salvation does belong to the individual by believing in the faithfulness of Christ. However, this is derived from Paul’s broader point that entrance into covenant relationship comes solely by Christ, and not by Torah. Paul gives his reasons why Torah, given by God, served its purpose, and that under Torah the Christ was condemned. Therefore, those who are now in Christ have died to the Law. Inevitably those who chose to fall under its restraints have embraced something that is no longer valid, which in its implication invalidates the relationship they established with Christ who was cursed by God under the Law, rendering Christ useless to them.
Baker has given me a great deal to think about and ponder concerning issues of our great faith in its practice. His commentary on Galatians, for me, did little to alleviate much of the confusion I had felt throughout the course and at times had actually contributed to my confusion. Baker’s striving for authentic community and his assessment of the state of the North American gospel and autonomous lens through which we have theologized presents his readers with the daunting task of correcting an overwhelming problem. As Baker always observed while masterfully articulating his observances, he hopes that he himself does not become condescending or judgmental to those from whom he has now distinguished and progressed himself from.
While for Baker, the exclusion of “religion” is somewhat articulated in terms of the individual’s alienation by the North American gospel (ironic if you think about it), the application that I take from this book are the larger global divisions within Christianity that currently exist. These divisions consist of denominationalism, ethnic divides and racial tension, and the clear disparity between the wealthy and the poor; all within the global, national, and local church! These divisions/distinctions are left to go unchallenged because they are subtly hid from our eyes. The message that Paul proclaims to the church in Galatia is still the same that must be proclaimed today: whatever it is that “defines you” only further divides us. There is no distinction that matters, whether it be the Torah, ethnicity, gender, or Christian tradition. There is not distinction; only the commonality shared in our Lord, Jesus Christ.
Works Cited
Baker, Mark D. Religious no more: building communities of grace & freedom. Eugene, Or.: Wipf & Stock, 2005.
The Bible: New International Version. Colorado Springs, CO: International Bible Society, 1984.
Hays, Richard B. "The Letter to the Galatians." The New Interpreter's Bible. Vol. XI. Nashville: Abington P, 2000.
Holy Bible: NRSV, New Revised Standard Version. New York: Harper Bibles, 2007.
Longenecker, Bruce W. "The Triumph of Abraham's God." Abington Press (1998).
McGahey, James R. The Nature and Rationale of Paul's Polemic Against "Works of the Law" in the Epistle to the Galatians. Diss. Dallas Theological Seminary, 1996.
Sloan, Robert B. "Paul and the Law: Why the Law Cannot Save." Novum Testamentum XXXIII (1991).
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