Galatians in a Nutshell
Paul’s letter to the Galatians is one of the most important and intriguing books of the New Testament, in parts not difficult to understand and in other parts densely packed with meaning, and therefore heavily disputed (check out Galatians 2:17-19 or 3:19-20 some time; if you think either is obvious, I can assure you your obvious interpretation is very much disputed!). It is only six chapters long, but there’s a lot in there. I had a friend in graduate school who wrote an entire dissertation to unpack just one verse (3:1).
How to summarize it in one sentence of 50 words? If you’re familiar with the book, give it a shot. Here’s one attempt at it:
Paul’s letter to the Galatians strenuously argues that being right with God comes to all people, Jew and gentile, only by faith in Christ, not by doing what the laws of Moses requires of Jews as the people of God, such as circumcision and observing sabbath and Jewish holy days.
I can now try to unpack this in a somewhat larger “nutshell.”
Paul’s letter to the Galatians is written in white-hot anger, unlike virtually all his other surviving writings (except the fragmentary letter of 2 Corinthians 10-13). This is his only letter that does not begin with Paul thanking God for his readers. It instead begins with astonishment: he cannot believe that the converts in his church(es) of Galatia have abandoned his preaching about Christ to follow a different understanding of the faith.
Whereas Paul’s other letters are directed to churches of specific cities, this one is addressed to churches of the large region of Galatia, which extended from north to south in central Asia Minor (modern Turkey).
Paul had established churches throughout the region by converting one-time pagans and had instructed them that it was only the death and resurrection of Jesus that could bring them in a right standing before God. But other Christian missionaries had come in his wake who insisted that since Jesus was the Jewish messiah sent to fulfill the Jewish scriptures, it was obviously necessary for his followers to convert to Judaism and follow the law given to the chosen people.
For men that would require circumcision; for men and women it would entail keeping keeping sabbath, Jewish festivals, presumably kosher food laws. If you want to be among the chosen ones, you need to do what the chosen ones are supposed to do!
Paul’s himself was a one-time law-committed highly-religious Jew, so he understands the issues full well. And is completely incensed at the idea. If the law of Moses could make a person right with God, there would have been no reason for God to send his son to die for the sins of the world. You could just keep the law.
Paul’s relatively brief but highly intense letter can be roughly divided into three parts:
(a) Autobiographical (chs. 1-2): Paul demonstrates that he has the one and only authoritative understanding of the Gospel of Christ by explaining how he learned of it and how the other apostles came to agree with him.
(b) Theological (chs. 3-4); he uses scriptural arguments based mainly on the life of the father of the Jews, Abraham, to show that God had all along planned to save people by faith, not by doing the works of the law.
(c) Ethical (chs. 5-6); Paul then shows that this “lawfree” gospel (justification apart from the law) does not lead to “lawless” behavior; on the contrary, only those who are followers of Christ who have thereby received the Holy Spirit are the ones who are able to live the lives that God demands.
The opening two chapters are remarkable within Paul’s letters, giving by far the most information about his earlier life, as he explains how he went from being a determined, hard-core religious Jew who had persecuted the followers of Jesus to becoming one of their number. It happened through a revelation of Christ that God himself had given him. This is where Paul learned his “gospel.” This “good news” is not simply that Christ’s death and resurrection is what brings “justification” (a “right standing” with God) but also the further corollary that since Christ is the way of salvation, there is no other. Paul’s own Jewish upbringing and zeal for the law was not sufficient for him to be “right” with God.
Once Paul came to believe this, he realized there were two major implications. The first was that the law of Moses never had been intended as the way to be righteous before God, unlike what he had always assumed. The value of the law was that it informed God’s people how to behave and more or less kept them in line until the time that salvation in Christ would appear. It was like a disciplinarian who tried to control people’s wicked impulses that were fueled by evil powers in the world tempting them to sin.
The problem with the law is that it told people how to behave, but it did not given them the power to do so. As a result, everyone was a transgressor of the very law that they tried to keep to be or be right with God. And that meant the law which revealed God’s will actually became a curse for his people.
Second, as a result the law therefore could play no instrumental role in salvation, and was never meant to do so. The payoff is that there was no payoff for non-Jews to try to keep the law of the Jews in order to be saved. Paul never condemns the law per se, or urges his fellow Jews to stop keeping it. They really were and are the chosen ones: they are they ones to whom God revealed himself; and God’s directives to them about how to live still apply. But adopting the ways of Judaism could not bring salvation. Only Christ, the fulfillment of God’s promises in the Hebrew Bible, could.
That in turn means that any former pagan who is now a follower of Christ makes a very big mistake in thinking that it is useful to convert to Judaism and keep the Jewish laws. Useful for what? It can’t establish a person’s standing before God or make them righteous before God. The law is for Jews. They are the chosen people. But they are chosen to be the ones to whom God revealed himself; they are not necessarily saved because they were chosen. Even though they were chosen to learn God’s will, now his will is shown to all people, Jew and gentile.
As a result, any gentile who follows Jesus who thinks she or he also needs to observe the law is not just a bit misguided. They have completely misunderstood the gospel. Salvation comes by Christ; observing the law has nothing to do with it.
That means that men who are submitting to the rather risky operation of circumcision are not merely doing something, well, painfully unnecessary. They show they do not understand the gospel and therefore do not really have faith in Christ (thinking they need something more in addition to faith). They are in danger of losing their salvation.
Paul argues that Abraham, the father of the Jews, was made right with God by faith. To prove it, Paul quotes Genesis 15:6, “Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness.” It was faith in what God said, not by doing anything, that Abraham was justified before God. Only later did God give him the “sign of the covenant,” circumcision (in Genesis 17). This shows that justification comes without circumcision, and is not earned by doing any of God’s demands.
God had promised Abraham and Sarah offspring, but that did not mean the Jewish people. It meant one person, who would fulfill the promise, Christ himself.
Paul indicates that he had talked with the Jerusalem apostles before him (Peter, James, etc.) in detail and that they agreed with his views of the matter.
He goes on to stress that those who believe in Christ are set free from the powers that force people to sin, and from the law, which brings condemnation because people invariably break it. That does not mean, though, that people who believe in Christ will lead lawless lives. Quite the contrary, followers of Jesus have the Spirit of God in them, guiding their lives, allowing them to do all the things God wants them to do. Without the Spirit, people live “according to the flesh,” engaged in all sorts of sinful activities (even if they are Jewish); but with the Spirit people live “according to the Spirit,” in full control of their godly activities and living live of love and care for others.
The other missionaries who preach otherwise are therefore false preachers, and the Galatian Christians need to commit themselves to lives of love in the Spirit, rather than take on the concerns of the Jewish law.
This is a letter with a fairly simple overall message, and a sometimes dense set of theological arguments to explain it, one of the most important and influential writings to come down to us from of early Christianity.
