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Preface

A Movement in the Making

German political leader Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898) once asserted that the making of laws is like making sausage. Sausage making is messy business and the ingredients might surprise you! Accordingly, it is better not to see sausages being made if you plan on eating them later! This same judgment may apply to the formation of the early Christian movement. Today’s apparent stability of denominational structures, creeds and doctrines, ordained ministry, and the existence of scriptures that are particularly Christian, the New Testament, give us the illusion that the Christian faith was fully formed from the very beginning just the way Jesus intended it and that there was a clear and unambiguous understanding of Jesus’ message and the meaning of the cross. In truth, during the first decades following Pentecost, the earliest followers of Jesus made it up as they went along, and often had very different understandings of Jesus’ message and impact on humankind. Many received their instruction through what they perceived to be direct encounters with the Holy Spirit, while others had heard Jesus’ message and experienced his healing miracles first-hand. Still others experienced Jesus through the radical hospitality and countercultural spirit of the first Christian communities. Some affirmed the significance of the Jewish tradition in the formation of Christians; others believed that Jesus’ message could be completely separated from his Jewish roots to the point of eliminating the Old Testament entirely from Christian theology.1

In the first few decades of the Jesus movement, new believers, like Jesus’ first male and female followers, experienced the gifts of the Spirit, manifest in ecstatic experiences, transformed lives, and healing touch. But they had no scriptures of their own, nor did they have creedal statements or stable institutional structures. They had key leaders, such as James the brother of Jesus, Peter, and later the Apostle Paul, but no universal and fully agreed upon beliefs or rituals. They had the Jewish scriptures, traditions, and rituals, and the stories of Jesus, passed on from one follower to another and recited within the early Christian communities. But the Jewish rituals initially meant little or nothing to non-Jewish followers of Jesus.

The emerging faith was open-spirited and unformed. What it might become in the decades ahead was anyone’s guess. In fact, there were many varieties of Christian faith emerging in the first decades of the Jesus movement. Later, some were declared heresies, for example, certain world and body denying philosophies and spiritual practices, often labeled as Gnostic, as well as unbridled charismatic movements led by those who saw themselves as direct conduits of the Holy Spirit’s wisdom, the Montanists. It is clear that there was diversity of theology, practice, and experience in the early Jesus movement, some of which, in the course of centuries, gave birth to the diverse theological and worship styles of our time.

In this dynamic and open-ended context, Paul’s Letter to the Galatians emerged and eventually gained the status of scripture. The Jewish sect, inspired by the Galilean healer and teacher, was going global and Paul was, according to Acts of the Apostles and his own affirmation, its leading messenger. In the course of his ministry, Paul founded churches throughout the Mediterranean world. Paul’s authority and apostleship were grounded in an audacious claim. Despite the fact he had persecuted the first followers of Jesus, he claimed that God had chosen him for a particular spiritual task. Paul had encountered the Risen One on the road to Damascus and he believed that this encounter gave him the same authority as Jesus’ first disciples. Paul’s mystical experience of the Risen One came with the call to mission. The Risen Christ gave Paul the vocation of sharing God’s good news with the Gentiles, the ethnic and religious outsiders he once viewed as spiritual inferiors.

The region of Galatia was at the heart of Paul’s mandate to reach out to the Gentiles. Journeying from his home base, as some scholars believe, Antioch in today’s Syria, Paul shared the good news in what is today central Turkey. He helped shape and may have planted small Christian communities in towns such as Derbe, Lystra, Iconium, and Antioch of Pisidia. Paul’s straightforward message of spiritual liberation touched the hearts of many Gentiles. The good news of Christ’s death and resurrection and the opportunity for new life in Christ inspired mystical and charismatic experiences and no doubt “signs and wonders” in the communities Paul founded. Some new members of the Jesus movement cried out “Abba, Father,” in response to the liberating news of God’s grace in Jesus Christ. They were, as Paul writes in the Letter to the Galatians, spiritually free and untrammeled by ritual and doctrine, including those of Jesus’ own religious tradition. They experienced themselves as new creations, freed from sin and guilt, as the spirit of Christ transformed them, body, mind, and spirit.

But spiritual honeymoons, like relational honeymoons, don’t usually last forever. As in the case with couples who fall in love, the initial excitement and belief that “love conquers all” often gives way to old habits and patterns of behavior. Paul heard stories of churches in trouble and reverting to past behaviors and belief systems. Rumors surfaced that his word of grace was being compromised by those who taught a return to Jewish dietary and spiritual practices, most particularly ethnically-separate table fellowship and male circumcision. Paul’s tone is angry and urgent. The fate of the Galatian churches and his mission to the Gentiles was at stake.

Galatians is no armchair theology, but a passionate argument for the grace of God, the unity of the church, and the equality of all Christians, despite differences in ethnicity, social standing, economics, and sexuality. In the providence of God, Paul’s letter was preserved and his faith vindicated. As New Testament scholar N.T. Wright asserts, Paul’s passionate Galatian letter gave birth to Christian theology. As I told my Galatians Bible study participants at South Congregational Church, we are here as Gentiles because of Paul’s message to the Galatians. Apart from Paul’s clarion call to Christian freedom, the Jesus movement might have remained a Jewish sect, defined by its adherence to the Jewish law, dietary habits, and practice of circumcision. Paul’s open-spirited and – dare I say – radical and progressive message enabled the Christian movement to become global in scope. The global reach of the gospel depended on its message becoming accessible to people in every time and place, beginning with the Gentile communities of the Roman Empire.

Paul’s passion is to share the good news without hindrance of culture or ritual. Accordingly, putting burdens on Gentile believers stands in the way of spreading Christ’s message of salvation. As N.T. Wright asserts, “it is absolutely imperative that all those ‘in the Messiah’ belong to the same table. Separation is not an option.”2

Galatians has been described as one of the greatest pieces of religious literature. Paul’s passionate message shaped the Christian vision of grace, faith, biblical interpretation and unity. These are still issues for us as we make it up as we go along in the context of our pluralistic and postmodern spiritual landscape.

From the perspective of biblical scholarship, the Letter to the Galatians “presented a glimpse of the controversy that surrounded the expansion of the Christian movement into the Gentile communities of the Mediterranean world.”3 Galatians was one of the formative texts of the sixteenth Protestant Reformation. Although Martin Luther may have seen – and thus to some extent distorted – Paul’s message in light of his own experience of guilt and grace and subsequent conflict with the Roman church, whom he identified with Jewish legalism, its message has nevertheless transformed lives and provided a normative vision of conversion experiences. Perhaps, beyond Paul’s original intent, Galatians, along with the Letter to the Romans, has shaped the contours of grace and provided a template for understanding God’s ability to transform persecutors into proclaimers and sinners into saints.

Galatians is a contemporary book. It asks us to consider the boundaries of Christian faith. It invites us to discern what is theologically and behaviorally essential to Christianity. Galatians has been an inspiration in the fight for equality in the church and the world for women, minorities, and most recently gay and lesbian persons. Galatians takes Jesus’ vision of radical hospitality and applies it to the real and imperfect churches where we worship. Accordingly, its message encourages personal spiritual freedom and the liberation of institutional structures.

Reflecting what John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg describe as the “radical Paul,” Galatians has been described as the magna carta of Christian freedom through its portrayal of open ended faith without fences or boundaries. Today’s readers of the letter to Galatians are challenged to affirm both diversity and unity in Christian experience and, in the process, extend our freedom in the body of Christ to the whole world.

As you begin your Galatians journey, remember Paul’s message of graceful transformation: in light of God’s suffering love on Calvary, what matters above all else is God’s new creation in your life and in your congregation. Let Paul’s passionate faith inspire you to embrace God’s wondrous diversity, whether in theological and liturgical differences in your congregation or Bible study group, and the various expressions of divine creativity in culture, ethnicity, and sexuality. Let the call to Christian unity guide your group conversations, inspiring you to listen and respond in ways that build bridges rather than walls.

A Word of Thanks and a Word on Perspective

Every commentator has a perspective, which shapes her or his understanding of scripture, and I am no exception. Raised in the evangelical wing of the American Baptist Churches, I grew up with revival preachers and altar calls as well as my Baptist minister father’s more low key approach to the gospel. The message I often heard was that we were sinners saved by grace, and transformed by Jesus’ sacrificial death on the cross on Calvary’s hill. It was that message that inspired me to “come forward” with tears in my eyes at nine years of age, dying to sin and accepting Jesus as my personal savior. As a teen, I found this small town evangelical faith too spiritually confining and too certain of itself and became as student and practitioner of Buddhism and Hinduism as well as North American Transcendentalism. Eventually, my journey led me back to grace, that is, Grace Baptist Church, in San Jose, California, where a long-haired college student was welcomed with all his questions and doubts. It was at Grace Baptist that I began to formulate my own theology, a creative synthesis of evangelical experience, mystical experiences, spiritual practices, and progressive process theology.

I am still a child of grace. I come at scripture as a living word, whose purpose is to liberate and transform. Scripture is the beginning and not the end of our spiritual journeys. Scripture invites us to be part of God’s holy adventure in our time and place, taking our place as the receivers and creators of the Christian message in our time. Like the first followers of the Risen Jesus, we create the meaning of grace in light of the concrete challenges and stresses of our time. In the spirit of their Hebraic parents, the New Testament authors experienced God’s presence in life-changing ways and shared that experience from their own particular perspective on Jesus’ message and work of salvation, and so do we.

Paul’s words to the Galatian communities are passionate, life-transforming, and faith-defining but they are not inerrant. No doubt Peter, whom Paul criticized, felt just as inspired by God as did Paul. James, the brother of Jesus and leader of the Jerusalem church, may have found both Peter and Paul too open-minded and liberal in their openness to Gentile culture and experience.

Paul’s passion and imaginative use of scripture invites us to be innovative in our scripture reading. A living word requires us to go beyond the words of scripture to discover God’s Spirit speaking in what is said and unsaid. In my own encounter with scripture, I read scripture as a source book of spiritual affirmations and pathways to discipleship. Read affirmatively, Galatians and its New Testament companions are good news revealing God’s loving vision to people in the first century as well as our own. They liberate us from the constraints of an unhealthy and irrelevant past and open us to God’s new creation.

I believe that God’s revelation is ongoing, global, and constantly new. As the United Church of Christ motto proclaims, “God is still speaking” and we need to listen to God’s many voices in scripture, science, literature, culture, and religious experience. Paul believed that his word was authoritative, but not final. Paul assumed our understanding of God was incomplete. “We see in a mirror dimly” and “know only in part” and will more fully understand when we come face to face with God (1 Corinthians 13:9-12). In that spirit, my own reading is progressive, open-spirited, evangelical, and mystical in orientation. I recognize that my approach is one of many possible interpretations of Paul’s passionate letter. Others will discover hints of the doctrine of substitutionary atonement, salvation by Christ alone, Christian superiority, or Pauline paternalism and sexism as they turn the pages of Galatians. Still others will find in Galatians a word of welcome, liberating us to be ourselves honestly and authentically in relationship to God and one another.

I believe that we can, like Paul, encounter God and be forever changed. That’s ultimately why I am writing this commentary; so that all who read this may experience transformation through encountering the living Christ in their encounter with Galatians.

I am grateful to many people for the writing of this text. First, I thank the community of faith that gathers at South Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, in Centerville, Massachusetts.4 Many of my thoughts were formulated in preparation and response to the Sunday morning and Tuesday noon Bible studies. I am grateful to this historic white-steeple Cape Cod congregation for supporting my integration of pastoral ministry and theological reflection. I am also grateful to creative New Testament scholars Greg Carey and Ronald Farmer for their insights. Jody and Henry Neufeld at Energion Publications have been supportive of my work and have improved this text by their editorial comments.

I give thanks for pastors who have shaped my own vocation as a scholar-pastor – in particular, John Akers, Ernie Campbell, George Tolman, George “Shorty” Collins, Clayton Gooden – as well as teachers whose pastoral care enabled me to claim my role as a pastoral theologian – John Cobb, Marie Fox, David Griffin, Jack Verheyden, and Richard Keady. As always I give thanks for the companion of lifetime, Kate Gould Epperly, whose ministerial vocation has shaped the evolution of my own life as a scholar, pastor, spiritual guide, parent, and now grandparent of two small boys.

1 For a picture of the early church see Bruce Epperly, Transforming Acts (Gonzalez, FL: Energion Publications, 2013).

2 N.T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, volume 1, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), 359.

3 Richard Hays, Galatians. The New Interpreter’s Bible. XI. (Nashville: Abingdon, 2000), 183.

4 http://southcongregationalchurch-centerville.org/