I began my remarks on St. Paul with a sentence from this Epistle, because it seemed so remarkably to declare the object of his life as well as his writings. I must of course take that sentence as declaring the object of the letter it stands in. But I will not force this on the reader; I hope it will impress itself on him when he considers how the Apostle stood toward his Galatian converts.
There is little dispute about the teachers who tried to turn this Church from Paul’s doctrines, or about their influence. They were Judaizing Christians. They set up the Apostles of the Circumcision against the Apostles of the Gentiles, claiming that Paul was no real Apostle but had merely learned from the original twelve and then perverted what he learned. They held that the circumcised had privileges far beyond the merely baptized—if the baptized could even be counted safe. And the Galatians, who had welcomed Paul with passionate fervor, listened to these insinuations and began to suspect he had deceived them about their own standing. All this is plain to any reader of the letter.
When he opens by declaring himself an Apostle not from men nor by man, he joins battle with those who spoke of the men Christ called on earth as his masters, with a claim to obedience he could never make. Far more was at stake than a personal slander. Underneath lay the heresy that Christ was a great and divine Prophet only during his thirty-three years on earth—so that those years were not the showing forth of One who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. On that view Christ had spent his power of naming Apostles and was not truly ruling His Church after His ascension. Paul’s own calling was the practical answer to this denial, and the whole Gospel was bound up in it; so he insists on it, not caring, as with the Corinthians, whether he is called arrogant.
The first two chapters mainly explain his relation to the Apostles of the circumcision. But he lets the Galatians know at once that he takes this up because their faith itself was in danger. These new teachers were not merely damaging his reputation or offering a different manner of teaching. They were undermining the whole New Testament dispensation; they preached another Gospel—which was not another, which was no Gospel at all. He gives them no quarter; he denounces and anathematizes them as robbers of the Gentiles and of mankind. They were playing the oldest and easiest trick with the old success: persuading their hearers that bondage was safer than freedom. The only way to deal with such men was to tell them that, however religious they seemed, they were denying Christ, who came to set men free.
He reminds the Galatians how fiercely he himself had been devoted to Jewish traditions—he knew them better than any of those now exalting them. Only because it pleased God to reveal His Son in him did he escape from them and find a message he must deliver to all. He did not learn it from Peter or John or anyone. After three years in Arabia he did go up to Jerusalem and stayed fifteen days with Peter, also seeing James the Lord’s brother. But for fourteen years he had no further dealings with the churches of Judæa. Then, engaged in his Gentile mission with Barnabas, they went up to Jerusalem—by revelation—wanting a further witness that they were not laboring in vain. Yet they took no dictation. They would not let Titus, a Greek, be circumcised, however much some, perhaps even the Apostles, wished it to satisfy false brethren who wanted to rob them of their liberty. To such men he would not yield for an hour. In the end those reckoned pillars of the Church laid no new restraints on them, but gave them the right hand of fellowship, treating their work as distinct from their own, only urging them—willingly—to remember their poor countrymen.
So far he had shown that the Apostles of Jerusalem were not his lawgivers or judges. At Antioch he went further. He rebuked Peter to his face, because Peter had at first eaten freely with Gentiles, then, when men came from James, drew back from them, setting an example the other Jews followed, even Barnabas. Paul rebuked this as contrary to the truth of the Gospel. He said to Peter before them all, “If you, a Jew, live like a Gentile, by what right do you force the Gentile to Judaize?” By Lachmann’s arrangement of the sentences, that is all Paul said then, and what follows belongs to the Epistle itself.
I still think the old division right. Those words alone could not have been intelligible to Peter and the Jews without what follows. It could easily be said, “No wonder you, an Apostle of the Gentiles, want to assert their equality with Jews; Peter, an Apostle of the Circumcision, is equally bound to assert the difference.” Paul, I take it, wanted to show Peter that he too, though an Apostle of the circumcision, was bound to hold this principle, and was as inconsistent in abandoning it as Paul would have been. They had agreed there were points where each should take his own course; Paul wants to make clear this was not one of them—that Peter could not hold the truth they shared in common if, to please any men, he refused full brotherly fellowship with the Gentiles.
Here is his argument: “We who are Jews by nature, and not sinners from among the Gentiles, knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law but through faith in Christ, have ourselves believed in Christ, so as to be justified by faith and not by works of the law.” As if to say: You are a Jew; you don’t have these Gentiles’ disadvantage; you are not a sinner because you belong to them. Yet you have believed in Christ, and felt yourself righteous only by that belief, not by anything you did as a Jew that set you apart from Gentiles. “But if,” he goes on, “in seeking to be justified in Christ we too are found to be sinners”—if by seeking this righteousness we confess ourselves sinners as much as those outside our covenant and law—“do we thereby make Christ a servant of sin?” For that was the Judaizers’ reasoning: in lowering ourselves to the Gentile level we lower our Master, as though He came merely to serve Gentile sinners, not to deliver holy Israel. But is it so? No indeed. I make myself a transgressor if I build again what I threw down. Certainly I, Jew as I am, am a sinner in myself; the law itself tells me so—tells me I am dead. I died to the law that I might live to God. I am crucified with Christ; I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in God and Christ, who loved me and gave Himself for me. I will not make void the grace of God. If righteousness comes by the law, then Christ died for nothing.
Bauer and his school rejoice that Paul set himself so passionately against the Jerusalem doctors, and showed their chief man how close he was to what was later called Ebionitism. But if I wanted to curb the pride of these neologians, this is the very passage I would dwell on. Does Paul set his theory of the Gospel against the other Apostles’, his doctrine of Justification against their doctrine of Works, his faith in Christ against their faith in the Law? Does not his whole argument turn on convicting Peter of a temporary treason against his own faith, his own convictions, his own usual professions? The whole speech would be a silly waste of words unless it showed what a Jew’s, a circumcised man’s, an Apostle of the Circumcision’s, faith must be to justify his trust in Christ—even supposing there were no Gentile in the world. If Peter had one Gospel and Paul another, Peter did nothing wrong or insincere. But if the peculiar duty laid on Peter and James—to display how great the Jew’s privileges were—exposed them to a special temptation into which Peter here fell, and fell in the very city where it would do most harm, hurting his own countrymen as much as the Gentiles, how needed was such a testimony to the truth of the Gospel they were both pledged to live and die for.
As usual, the Apostle has done much work in little space. While seeming only to defend his own title, he has entered the heart of the matter, torn the Judaizers’ new Gospel to pieces, and stripped away the authority they claimed for it. Now he can turn to their victims. There is no real gap between his speech to Peter at Antioch and his address here to the foolish Galatians. There he said he was dead with Christ and lived by Him; here he asks who bewitched them, before whose eyes Christ had been openly set forth crucified. I do not press whether the words “in you” should stand or fall. I only ask that we read this alongside the sixth and seventh chapters of Romans to see why he speaks of Christ crucified. If he had not preached to the Galatians that they were crucified with Christ and that Christ lived in them, this language would have no ground and no clear connection with what follows. He asks whether they received the Spirit by works of the law or by the hearing of faith. He surely means that the gift of the Spirit was the great sign that Christ had come and the New Covenant had displaced the Old. Was this highest of all gifts given because they had earned it, or because they trusted God as a Father to give good gifts to His children? He pauses to ask whether they really think any blessing could be greater than this, whether outward fleshly gifts could make them more complete than this spiritual one. Then he argues with the Judaizers on their own ground. They prize the covenant with Abraham. What is it? Its ground is belief in God, its fruit is righteousness, its fullness is “in you shall all nations be blessed.” If you would be blessed with Abraham, you must believe as he did. But you want more—to be under the law; that is, to be not under a blessing but under a curse, for the law is ratified by a curse. Those who had the law did not want to be under it, for the Prophet said the just shall live by faith, and the law is not of faith: its rule is “he that does these things shall live by them.” Christ, bearing the accursed cross, redeemed us from the law’s curse—the death that lies on all men alike—so that in Him Abraham’s blessing might reach Gentiles as well as Jews, and we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.
Romans has prepared us for this kind of argument, but here it is sharper and more epigrammatic, suited to the Galatian temper. The contrast between the covenant’s blessing and the law’s curse would startle them by its plain truth, however little they had thought of it. The remarks that follow are similar. A human agreement, once made, is not cancelled by its maker. The promises to Abraham and his seed were made by God Himself; would God’s own law annul them? And note the wording: it is to Abraham and his seed, not his seeds. It may seem Paul is playing with words, accommodating the Rabbinical teachers or the lively superficial people they misled. I don’t deny he knew both and used his knowledge—but to cure the disease, not confirm it. The distinction between seeds and seed is a real one; it catches the ear, and the deeper you look the weightier it grows. As in Romans he turned the Israelite’s prejudice against Ishmael and Edom against itself—showing that the calling of Isaac and Jacob proved the covenant was not fleshly, as they made it when excluding the Gentiles—so here he dwells on the one seed, not the many, to witness that one Person was meant in God’s plan, He in whom all earth’s families were to be blessed. So his argument runs: if the Jew claims a blessing as Abraham’s descendant, he must first claim it simply as a blessing; second, through a Person, its Mediator; third, as a blessing of universal extent.
Then what does the Law mean, if it stands thus against the Covenant and the Promise? He answers, “It was added because of transgressions.” It assumes wrongdoing, the separation of those to whom it is sent from Him who chose them and revealed Himself to them. It served this purpose until the seed should come to whom the promise was made. It was ordained through angels, but placed in the hand of a Mediator. And “a Mediator is not a mediator of one, but God is one. Is the law then against God’s promises? No. If a law could give life, righteousness would indeed come by law. But Scripture has shut up all things under sin, that the promise by faith in Christ might be given to those who believe.” This teaching—that the Law was administered by angels—bears importantly on the New Testament revelation and links this Epistle with Hebrews. There the new dispensation is the dispensation of a Son, set against the old as a dispensation by Angels, yet with a Son implied throughout Jewish history and prophecy. Here the matter is viewed less generally and somewhat differently. God’s promises all point to a certain seed; the law is given through angels or messengers, yet always with reference to a Mediator in whom the law is fulfilled and God and man are united. The law expresses their separation—herein its curse. The covenant expresses their union—herein its blessing. But the blessing can be realized, and the curse removed, only when He who is at once the Seed and the Mediator appears. The law implies two parties to be reconciled. Yet since God is one and always the same, His law and His promises cannot be contrary; their source and object are the same. Law proclaims righteousness and would make men righteous if it could—but it cannot; it can never give life. The written letter has shut up all things under sin, that the promise of righteousness and life might be given to those who have faith in Christ. I have treated language like this at length on Romans, and there one must go for the full explanation of the law of sin and righteousness—how the flesh is shown to have no good in itself, and righteousness comes from Christ on all who believe. What matters here is the phrase “shut up,” kept as in a garrison under law, awaiting the faith to be revealed. The Judaizers told the Galatians that the old law and covenant put men in a higher state than baptism—good as far as it went, a preliminary, but to stand on high ground they must add the Judaic rite. Paul’s great aim is to reverse that order: to show the old was itself the preliminary, that law and covenant both implied something not yet declared. The state the silly Galatians imagined as a special elevation was in its nature elementary. The law was the schoolmaster leading men to Christ, that they might be made righteous by faith in Him. But now faith has come, now its object is revealed, and they are no longer under that schoolmaster. “For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free, male nor female; you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s seed, heirs according to promise.” This is where he has been leading us from the first. Sonship to God is the highest state of all; everything in the old dispensation hinted at it, looking forward to when men could claim it. That time has come. You Gentiles have been baptized into Christ, have put on Christ, have claimed sonship in Him. What more do you want? To be heirs of Abraham’s blessing? You are that already. This is the inheritance.
Then comes that remarkable passage, so important for understanding Paul, in which he says men did not begin to be sons of God when they were declared sons; their earlier discipline and training already implied that this was their character—just as the Roman act of emancipation did not make men children who were not children, but recognized them as children and gave them a child’s rights. What is specially to be noted is that Paul draws no distinction here between Jew and Gentile. We might have supposed the Jews, God’s chosen, were the children under education, treated as servants until emancipation. But here, as everywhere, Paul is a leveller. We, he says, while we were infants, were in servitude under the elements of the world; and you who did not know God were in servitude to things that by nature are no gods. He does not confuse Jew with Gentile, nor undervalue deliverance from idolatry; but he describes both as children under servitude, both subjected to the world’s elements, so as to be trained for the fullness of time, when Christ, born of a woman, born under the law, should redeem those under the law, that they might receive the adoption of sons—and, because they were sons, God would send the Spirit of His Son into their hearts, crying Abba, Father.
So he treats their clinging to these Judaizing teachers as nothing less than a relapse into idolatry. He had rescued them from it only by preaching that the unseen God had sent His Son to claim them from the service of visible things and adopt them into His family. If they were not in His family, if they became servants of visible things in hopes of a higher state, then whatever they called themselves, they were parting from the God of Abraham and doing homage to the very things law and prophets condemned. This was a startling charge for men who fancied themselves super-Jews and claimed to raise the Gentiles to their level. But it fits all Paul’s teaching. Jews, he saw, must become idolaters—the worst kind—unless they preached a Gospel of deliverance to idolaters that was equally a Gospel for themselves.
This conviction comes out strongly in verses 11 to 21 of chapter 4. He fears he may have labored among the Galatians in vain. It is not that they have wronged him; he only wants them to share the blessing that is theirs as much as his. They know he came to them in weakness—something in his condition on his first visit was especially humiliating—yet it did not stop them receiving him as an angel of God, as though Christ Himself had come. Then they would have plucked out their eyes to give him. They were wonderfully zealous—and zeal is excellent in a good cause, if it does not spend itself merely in love of those present. But there is a zeal that is not excellent: men zealous to rob their disciples of what is most precious, so as to make them dependent and admiring. That is not the affection Paul would cultivate or win. Yet he feels for them a mother’s love and pangs; he is in travail again until Christ be formed in them. That is what he wants for them—not something foreign and external. While they chase mere externals he must doubt them, and even come to them again with a sterner voice.
After this outpouring of personal feeling—which belongs as much to the Epistle’s purpose as similar passages did in Corinthians—he returns to his old line of argument. He still argues from the man’s own ground, still takes up the thought familiar to Jews, but strips away its triviality and brings out its latent truth. You wish to be under law—that is, under the Old Testament economy. Then let us hear what its own books say. Consider Hagar and Sarah, Isaac and Ishmael. Your teachers love to draw fanciful meanings from that story. I grant it has a meaning; what is it? The child of the flesh was Hagar’s; the child of promise was Sarah’s. Sarah was free, Hagar a bondslave. I have called you to be children of promise, of God’s covenant; they want you to be children of bondage, servants of the law given on Sinai. They would tie you to Jerusalem—but not God’s Jerusalem, the free, heavenly city; rather a fleshly, earthly, slavish city in bondage with all her children. I call you to be citizens of the free city, children of that mother of whom the prophet speaks—the true Sarah, barren yet destined to have more children than the other. I know that if you claim this freedom you will suffer persecution from those content with fleshly bondage. But the divine word has gone out: “Cast out the bondwoman and her son; the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the free.” A strangely new moral this must have seemed to the Rabbis, one never occurring to them amid all their allegories. Yet it carried its own proof. It was no pretty application, but the detection, in one case, of a divine law running through every fact of the divine history.
Freedom is held out to man as the aim of all God’s dealings with him. Christ fulfilled the law in working out man’s freedom, and in His freedom they were to stand fast. To stoop to bondage was to renounce Him. To be circumcised was to say He had not redeemed them; it was to bind oneself to keep the whole law, to fall from grace. “For we, in spirit, by faith, wait for the hope of righteousness.” That is our reward and expectation—to know God’s righteousness and share it. If united to Christ, made sons of God in Him, we have it; for in Him neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts, but faith working through love. Plainly, there would be no faith working through love, no reaching after righteousness, in those who thought circumcision would save or perfect them; they would not grasp what they were saved from, nor dream what perfection is. So the Apostle does not hide his alarm for them. He trusts the leaven has not filled their hearts, but a little leaven leavens the whole lump. Whoever troubled them with this new Gospel of circumcision will bear his judgment. It was an easy doctrine to preach and could spare a man much persecution; but he trusts God will cut off those who trouble them.
The hint he has dropped about the moral effects of liberty and slavery he now follows out to the end. What did his opponents suppose he meant by liberty? The liberty of the flesh, each pleasing himself? No—the liberty of yielding to God’s Spirit, of serving one another in love. “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” is the great law of liberty; the right to bite and devour one another is a wretched right. Two powers contend for them: the flesh lusting against the Spirit, the Spirit against the flesh, so that they cannot do all the good or all the evil they intend. But if led by the Spirit, they will not fulfill the lusts of the flesh, and they will not be under law—for law exists to condemn the works of the flesh, and against the fruits of the Spirit there is no law. As he said already, those who belong to Christ are crucified with Him; they have renounced the flesh and its lusts and claimed the righteousness and life in Him.
I have noted elsewhere the striking agreement between this passage, in the Epistle thought most Pauline and most anti-Jacobite, and the Epistle of St. James—an agreement precisely in the assertion of liberty. The royal law of James is the law of liberty in Galatians. Both teachers insist alike that the Son of God has come to give us power to be spiritual creatures and carry out God’s will in the spirit, and both apply this to confuting Jewish vanity and pharisaism. Only James confutes the Pharisee by showing him what his ceremonial law really means—how it is fulfilled by one who counts true service of God as visiting the fatherless and widows in their affliction; while Paul shows what foundation had been laid for a spiritual, universal economy after the Jewish ceremony and polity should crumble. So the last part of the Epistle points out what sympathy and fellowship the members of the church would have; how they would restore the fallen, distrust themselves, bear one another’s burdens and their own; what sharing of blessings between teacher and taught; what unwearied zeal in doing good; what hope of a harvest of eternal life if they sowed to the Spirit, and what poor results if they sowed to the flesh—even with all their zeal for circumcision and law. That zeal, when it forced bondage on the Gentiles, was fleshly in the plainest sense, a rebellion against the cross of Christ—the only thing Paul would glory in, by which the world was crucified to him and he to the world. In Christ Jesus there was a new creation; circumcision and uncircumcision were at an end. To all who walk by that rule he wishes mercy and peace, and to the Israel of God.