Original Meaning
THE VAST MAJORITY of scholars see a major section beginning at 3:1 and ending at 4:31. For most, this section is considered the theological argument of Paul. I have entitled it in my outline “Paul’s Theological Vindication of His Message.” Furthermore, most scholars see 3:1–5 as expressing the essential argument for the entire section. Thus, I have entitled these verses “The Thesis Stated.” Interestingly, however, Paul “states” his thesis here through a series of rhetorical questions, and the thesis itself is found in the implicit answers to each question. For example, Paul asks in verse 2, “I would like to learn just one thing from you: Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law, or by believing what you heard?” Now the answer to that question, according to Paul, must be “by believing what you heard.” And the implication, then, is that the Spirit comes to a person when that person believes, or surrenders, to the message about Jesus Christ.
This first unit takes another tack that is not frequently found in Pauline theological arguments, namely, the entire unit proceeds by way of argument from experience. Paul here appeals not to logic or Scriptural foundation, but to the Galatians’ experience of conversion and Christian living. In essence, Paul asks, “How have things religious happened to you? Did these things happen through your association with the law of Moses? Or did they occur through faith in Christ?” Paul’s appeal, then, is an appeal to their experience, and from that experience to some lessons about theology. By “experience” I mean the concrete events and realities that happened to the Galatians, along with their perceptions of those events and realities. I refer, then, to the things they observed, touched, felt, and thought.
Our unit here may be divided into two parts:
1. Paul’s personal question (v. 1)
2. Paul’s questions about experience (vv. 2–5)
This second part has four questions: (1) the question about initiation (v. 2); (2) the question about completion (v. 3); (3) the question about persecution (v. 4); and (4) the question about miracles (v. 5). We need to look at each of these in turn.
Paul’s personal question (v. 1) The “header” for this section, “You foolish Galatians!” is not intended to make friends, but neither was it perceived as a personal insult and therefore unworthy of an apostolic leader. As I said in my comments on 1:1–9, the latitude for acceptable speech in debate was much greater then than it is today. Such “name calling” and heated rhetoric is found elsewhere in the New Testament, whether on the lips of John the Baptist (Matt. 3:7–10), Jesus (Matt. 23; Luke 24:25), James (James 4:1–12; 4:13–5:6), or Paul elsewhere (2 Cor. 10–13). While we may not imitate Paul in this regard, we can learn about different but acceptable forms of rhetoric.
The term foolish, however, captures Paul’s point: they were illogical1 in committing themselves to the Pauline message of God’s grace in Christ and then succumbing to the Judaizers’ Moses-gospel. Most doubt that Paul is seriously interested here in the “who,” for he already knows the answer to this question: the Judaizers. Rather, his question is rhetorical in preparation for the following exclamation: “How could you have been fooled2 after learning about the crucifixion of Jesus Christ!”3
Crucifixion is the center of Paul’s understanding about Jesus Christ. What may be distasteful to moderns is the center of his attention.4 For Paul, the cross delivers from the present evil age (1:4) and murders the law, thus terminating its lordship (2:19–20; 4:5), so that we can die to the law, sin, and the world (5:24; 6:14); the cross of Christ justifies (2:21), absorbs our guilt (3:10–14), and ends nationalistic Judaism (2:19–20). We can see from this impressive list of the accomplishments of the cross in Galatians that Paul has wrapped his entire argument both for Christ and against the Judaizers around the cross of Christ. It is no wonder that early theologians of the New Testament, like Tertullian, developed the sign of the cross. In fact, Tertullian wrote:
At every forward step and movement,
at every going in and out,
when we put on our clothes and shoes,
when we bathe,
when we sit at table,
when we light the lamps,
on couch, on seat,
in all the ordinary actions of life,
we trace upon the forehead the sign [of the Cross].5
John Stott states it well: “There is then, it is safe to say, no Christianity without the cross. If the cross is not central to our religion, ours is not the religion of Jesus.”6
Whatever Paul is referring to in verse 1—whether it was the publicity of the event or the impressiveness of the event7—it must have been a compelling experience. Paul knew that his initial preaching of the gospel at Galatia was a memorable and powerful experience. He recalls the same event later and says that “you welcomed me as if I were an angel of God, as if I were Jesus Christ himself,” and then he goes on to ask, “What has happened to all your joy?” (4:14–15). I suggest that the intensity of this experience, their conversion experience, leads Paul to appeal to it first. “What he had preached to them was so openly and clearly proclaimed that Paul is at a loss to know how his converts could ever have failed to see its significance or to appreciate its implications for the question at hand.”8
Paul’s questions about experience (vv. 2–5) Paul now goes to a series of questions that seem to progress from earlier to later experiences in their own Christian development.
The question about initiation (v. 2). He begins with their first experience, their initiation into Christianity, their conversion. His little introductory statement is a bit naughty: “I would like to learn just one thing from you.” We know that this “one thing” was a piece of bait which, if taken, would be yanked on by Paul and cost them their entire time in the waters of “Judaizing Christianity.” If he gets them to answer this question honestly and therefore properly, he knows they will have to abandon the Judaizers and rejoin his group.
His question? “Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law, or by believing what you heard?” Here Paul appeals to their initial, perhaps charismatic, experience of receiving the Spirit. And he wants to know: How did they get the Spirit? By obeying Moses or by obeying the gospel of faith? Before answering these questions, we need to pause over the expression “receive the Spirit.”
For Paul, receiving the Spirit is the identifying characteristic of the Christian. To be a Christian is to be indwelt by the Spirit, and to be indwelt by the Spirit is to be a Christian (cf. Rom. 8:9–11). The Spirit of God is the definition of the Christian.9 Paul says that the Christian’s very beginning is with the Spirit (v. 3), and he contends that God works among Christians through the Spirit (v. 5). Faith brings the blessing of Abraham, and this blessing is the “promise of the Spirit” (v. 14). Later, he says that those who are truly sons of God are those who have been granted the Spirit, who calls out “Abba, Father” (4:6). What Paul is talking about here may be an experience, and it may very well be a charismatic one, but it is not some experience subsequent to faith in Christ. For Paul, faith in Christ means being granted God’s Spirit. This granting of the Spirit ends the age of the law. Abraham’s promise is the promise of the Spirit (3:14), and when the law had run its course, God sent his Spirit (4:4–6). So it makes sense that those who live in the Spirit are not under the law (5:18).
We need to address here the comment made above that this receipt of the Spirit was perhaps “charismatic.” By “charismatic” I simply mean that the Galatians may have spoken in tongues, displayed miracles, or been given prophetic utterances as demonstrations of the presence of the Holy Spirit. Historians of the early churches are well aware of the amount of charismatic activity that took place, for which we find evidence in Acts (cf. Acts 2–3; 8; 10; 18) and in the debates arising at Corinth (cf. 1 Cor. 12–14). Charismatic phenomena were neither unique nor surprising in the early churches.10 Thus, it would not be surprising if charismatic experiences characterized, or were at least present at, Galatia. Furthermore, at verse 5 Paul confirms that miracles were taking place in Galatia: “Does God give you his Spirit and work miracles among you … ?” There is no question here about the presence of miracles; the debate, as will be seen below, was over the source of these miracles—from Moses through works, or from God’s Spirit through faith? And observe how closely “giving the Spirit” is to “working miracles.” Finally, it is just possible that the crying out of “Abba, Father” was an experience of either ecstasy or an inspired utterance (4:6).11 Thus, I retain the possibility that Paul’s appeal was not only to their conversion experience of receiving the Spirit but that this experience was also charismatic and therefore particularly memorable.
The real issue here, however, is not the experiential one; this was assumed. The issue was how the experience took place and what triggered it. Was it “by observing the law” or “by believing what you heard”? In discussing these two options, we observe that we are discussing an important issue for each of the four questions we are examining and so some detail is required.
First, “observing the law” is a fluent rendering of “out of [or, on the basis of] works of law.” As I have often observed (and will continue to do as we go on), this expression describes behavior that conforms to the law of Moses, done in order to express the confession that acceptance with God, while it may come through Christ, is deeply dependent on obeying the specific laws of Moses. It is that behavior that is inherently cultural imperialism and that denies the sufficiency of Christ.
Now, Paul argues, if the Galatians will but look at their own personal histories, they will quickly discover that (1) they received the Holy Spirit while Paul was ministering to them the first time; (2) they received the Spirit when they believed in Jesus Christ and surrendered themselves to him; (3) they learned about Mosaic stipulations later from the Judaizers; and (4) while their escapade into Mosaic religion may have not eliminated their experience of the Holy Spirit and the presence of miracles (v. 5), they got no further ahead when they accepted the message of the Judaizers. Thus, Paul reasons, it is best to abandon the Judaizers’ gospel and to continue to walk in the truth of the gospel.
Second, “by believing what you heard” is a translation of what would literally be, “out of the hearing of faith.” This, Paul infers, is how they got the Holy Spirit. Scholars disagree whether this expression means (1) “hearing about the need for the faith”; (2) “believing what you heard [the gospel]”; or (3) “hearing, that is, faith.”12 While I am inclined to accept the second or third option—the difference is minimal anyway—I am convinced that the issue Paul has in mind is the absolute contrast between a religious life based on commitment to Moses (works of the law) and one based on surrender to Christ in faith (believing what you heard).
This “one thing” Paul wanted to learn has now been raised to the conscious level by the Galatians. If they received the Spirit by faith, then they are wrong in attaching themselves now to the laws of the Judaizers; if they received the Spirit by observing the law, then Paul is wrong and the Judaizers are right. But, Paul knows, they received the Spirit earlier than the Judaizers’ arrival, and therefore they have to admit right here that they received it by faith. The debate is effectively over now. Paul is the winner. Paul could end his letter right here. He didn’t, so we have to go on as well.
The question about completion (v. 3). Since Paul, like any good debater, assumes that his readers are on his wavelength and agree with him, he begins with an assumption: “After beginning with the Spirit.” This assumption is based on the correctness of his previous argument. Assuming that they began in the Spirit, Paul now wants to know if they are going to find perfection, or completion,13 “by human effort.” Here I must disagree resolutely with the NIV, which translates the Greek term sarki (“by flesh”) with “by human effort.” The unfortunate dimension of this translation is that it makes the reader think the issue is one of “effort” (i.e., merit-seeking) versus “non-effort” (i.e., faith). This misunderstands the import of both “flesh” and “faith” and so fails to take into consideration the function of the law for the Judaizers.
Rather, what Paul has in mind is “flesh” in the sense of a life that is not based solely on Christ’s work and the power of the Holy Spirit.14 To live in the “flesh” is to ignore the Spirit, and, in this context, Paul may be thinking partly in terms of circumcision—the paramount religious act in the flesh, probably seen as the perfection or completion of the proselyte’s faith and obedience. What dominates Paul’s mind here is the notion of flesh that he uses elsewhere. Similar to Paul’s message in 4:23 and 29, the Spirit and the flesh are two different domains under which a person chooses to live or, put in time categories, two different periods of time. It is the issue of two ages (before Christ and after Christ), two worlds that war against one another (5:16–18). This means that Paul sees life in the “flesh” as life under the law; in a strange twist of fate for Judaism, Paul sees law and flesh as two coordinates and Christ and Spirit as their opposites. The opposite of “flesh” in 3:3 is not “faith,” as if Paul were talking about effort or reception; rather, its opposite is Spirit. In choosing to move over to the view of the Judaizers, Paul argues, the Galatians were choosing to live in the “flesh” and were revoking their claim to live in the Spirit, which is the new age inaugurated by Christ’s death.
The question about persecution (v. 4). Paul’s third question pertains to the early experiences the Galatian converts had in persecution. What Paul envisages is simple: after their conversion to Christ (according to the Pauline gospel), the Galatian converts experienced persecution at the hands of others (probably at the hands of Jews, perhaps also the Judaizers; see 4:29). Now Paul asks, “Have you suffered so much for nothing?” In other words, had you simply converted to Judaism immediately, you would never have experienced the persecution you encountered for converting to Christ. If you suffer as a Christian, it is for something; but if you suffer as a Christian and then toss it all away by converting to Judaism, your suffering as a Christian would be for nothing. So, he asks, was this all in vain? Paul is both shaming the Galatians and appealing to his standard argument (see 4:29; 5:11) that those who are persecuted are in the right and those who persecute are in the wrong.
The question about miracles (v. 5). His final question is simple: “Does God give you his Spirit and work miracles among you because you observe the law [i.e., ‘on the basis of works of law’; see above], or because you believe what you heard?” The means has not changed: it is either through surrender to Christ or through commitment to Moses. The manifestation, however, has changed. Now it is not receiving the Spirit but the presence of miracles. The Galatians were well aware of God’s powerful workings in their midst; they were no doubt proud of their “power evangelism.” But, Paul queries, what triggered God’s power? By now the Galatians must be either hiding in shame or continuing the Judaizers’ polemical responses by appealing to Scripture, which Paul goes on to rebut.
Paul has sustained here a vigorous polemical argument on his behalf, and it is highly appealing to the Galatians since it is drawn from their experience. Their experience, from front to back, confirms the message of Paul and counters the message of the Judaizers. God’s Spirit comes to us and stays with us through faith; God’s Spirit has nothing to do with “observing the law.”
Bridging Contexts
INASMUCH AS THIS section is thoroughly an appeal to experience, it is best to begin with experience. We begin by observing that certain experiences are powerful in our lives. Not all experiences are powerful and life-changing, but some are. I am concerned here only with those major experiences in life that change us. Such experiences would certainly include crucial moments in our upraising; discovering our special talents, such as pitching a baseball or solving intricate mathematical problems; special experiences in our physical development; our marriage; our choice of career and the initial experiences in that career; changing careers; discovering that we have a fatal disease, like cancer or the HIV virus; special moments of success or failure in our life ambitions; and the few moments when we actually face that we are growing old. In addition to these, one of the more powerful experiences in life, for many, is a religious conversion.
Religious conversions both change our pasts and shape our futures. In them is communicated the goodness of God’s love in spite of our sin, the perception of God’s design for our world and how we fit in that design, and the significance of a religious community. In many churches, Christians are fond of recounting their religious conversion, and some churches make time available weekly for the recital of these experiences in life.
Because religious conversion is such a powerful experience, it can be appealed to with force and persuasion. Paul does precisely that with the Galatians. He knew that their conversion was a powerful experience; after all, he was there and was the herald of the gospel that transformed them (4:12–16). In effect, he knew the simplicity of their experience and so could appeal to it: it was triggered, through God’s grace, as a result of the proclamation of being accepted by God through faith in Christ alone. They did believe and so experienced the rush of God’s Spirit and the love of his forgiveness. We cannot doubt that the Galatians continued to rehearse their own conversions over and over as they reflected on the new life they found in Christ.
What we need to recognize is that experiences are powerful in life and cannot be denied as unreal. We cannot pretend that they did not happen and we cannot wish them away. I can remember a crucial week of camp when I was a teenager that forever transformed my life. Prior to that week I wanted to be a professional athlete; after that week I wanted to serve Christ, whether as an athlete or not. Prior to that week I only occasionally read my Bible, rarely prayed, and halfheartedly attended church; I did not see anything of value in Christian community and did not see God’s will for my life as the most essential thing to know. After that week all these things changed: I devoted my life to praying, studying the Bible, and teaching it to others; I found Christian fellowship to be not only valuable but absolutely foundational for growth and accountability; and I saw that all that mattered in life was to do what God had called me to do.
I remember this experience as if it were yesterday: I can still see the colors of trees under which I prayed; I can still see the basketball court on which I was playing a missionary whom God used to speak to me; I can still smell the “mess hall” and hear the voices of the room. I can smell the cabin in which I stayed and I can still feel the emotions of listening to a man of God expound Scriptures, one of which was Ephesians 5:18. And over and over in my life, I have appealed myself to this experience—when I was down, when I was unsure as to what God wanted from me, when I needed encouragement after failures. I knew that God began right there a work that he would finish (Phil. 1:6). I rebounded off of this experience over and over, knowing that God would not take me so far and then be done with me. The experience was powerful and helped shape my life. Its power has enabled me to draw faith lessons from it with confidence.
But we have also learned that experiences can be deceiving. Paul is not here justifying all experiences, nor is he appealing to every Galatian experience. He is talking here about an experience he witnessed and knew well, and he appealed only to certain dimensions of it. So, although it is true that experiences are powerful, there is no mechanism in our system to make sure that power is attributed only to good experiences. It is simply untrue to agree with the pop singer who claims that because it feels so good, it must be right. Paul appeals, then, to a major experience (their conversion) that was witnessed by many, and he argues the predominance of faith because the “works of the law” had not yet appeared as an option for the Galatians. So while we may want, at times, to bank on our experiences and while we may, at times, want to appeal to others’ experiences, we find justification for doing so only if that experience is known, confirms the point that is being made, and is in accordance with the Bible.
Paul was willing to appeal to experience in his theological argumentation. Theology without experience is sterility, while experience without theology is emotionalism. True theology is something that also needs to be experienced, and experience needs to be theologically sound; and here I am not talking only about “ecstasy” and “tongues” but about what the Puritans called our “religious affections.” To know about the love of God is not enough; we need to feel it, to sense it, and to be moved by it because God wants our entire beings to be wrapped up in his love. J. I. Packer, in his truly great book on God, writes much about theology and the intricacies of what we know about God. But he says early on in his book that “we must not lose sight of the fact that knowing God is an emotional relationship, as well as an intellectual and volitional one, and could not indeed be a deep relation between persons were it no so.”15 And Pascal said: “The [bare] knowledge of God is very far from the love of Him” (Pensées 4.280). I would call this “love of Him” the genuine experience of God, apart from which we do not know God; and I would say that experience is crucial for the entirety of our Christian faith. And because experience is crucial, we can appeal to it. But we must do so carefully, because what some have experienced is simply not in accordance with Scripture.
Paul begins this section with an appeal to experience; this does not mean that we need to begin our polemical work and evangelistic apologetics with appeals to experience. Paul is not consciously setting out a hierarchy of logical arguments. And in these appeals, he does something that is as effective now as it was then: he grounds his appeals in rhetorical questions. Rhetorical questions are questions that are really not questions because their answers are obvious, so obvious they are not answered. The question is meant to engage the reader (or listener) in a way that forces the reader to arrive at the desired answer. It is the answer that matters, not the question. This is why throughout the commentary above I assumed answers to each of these questions. Paul assumed his readers would catch on to what he was getting at.
This form of communication is effective and could be used more than perhaps we do. The silence of not answering creates a situation when the answer is actually provided but not aloud. Such silence allows the listener (or reader) to reflect on the answer and internalize it. Perhaps some of the following rhetorical questions can be used in our applications of Galatians. Has God provided the Holy Spirit or the law as your moral guide? Is God’s Spirit sufficient for guiding your life? Did God send his Son for one nation or for all? Is his Son’s sacrifice intended for all people or only for white suburbanites? Does God use handicapped or only healthy people? As we look around in our church today, do we see a collection of economically similar or dissimilar people? Are there people of different economic classes in our community? Does God enable only men or also women? Are we reaching only our kind or all kinds of people? Are we obeying the truth of the gospel or are we obeying a gospel that we have fashioned?
Contemporary Significance
EXPERIENCE IS AN integral part of all of our lives. We strip our Christian faith of one of its most important dimensions if we rob it of experience and pretend that Christianity is unemotional, unobservable, and untouchable. Paul knew the “witness of the Spirit” (Rom. 8:16), and so did John (1 John 3:19–20; 5:10–11). Countless Christians have experienced God’s grace and cannot be persuaded that it was not God who encountered them. Paul in our passage appeals to the experience of conversion that the Galatians had when he preached the gospel to them. We should not deny this dimension of Christianity. But neither should we seek to conform all people to one kind of experience, nor should we demand that every person have some kind of powerful experience as evidence for conversion.16
I believe it is important for local churches to provide opportunities for Christians to stand before their brothers and sisters and recount their experiences with God, especially their conversion experiences. While there needs to be control over what can be said (I am not describing what psychologists call “group therapy”), our fears about what will be said are probably greatly exaggerated. Personal story-telling is not a kindergarten exercise but is the very structure of our life, for if we have no story we have no life. What I am proposing is that Christians be encouraged to rehearse aspects of their story and to tell of their experiences. Knowing the experience of others may help us to understand them, to pray for them, and to instruct them.
I am frequently called upon to be a coach for one of my son’s local teams; sometimes it is basketball and other times it is baseball. What I have found with these young men (twelve-and thirteen-year olds at the present) is that they like stories—stories about major leaguers, about our local high school team, and about my time in Little League “decades ago” (when bats were wooden and when kids played sandlot games). Why do they like stories? Because stories capture real life in real events. The same is true of Christians, whether they are children, teenagers, or adults: we can all identify with stories. Why is the biography section of bookstores so popular? Because they tell stories about real people. Why did God tell so much of Israel’s history in stories, why is the nature of a gospel little more than a biography, and why did Jesus tell so many stories (i.e., parables)? Because stories are important and animate the imagination. Why does a congregation suddenly become more attuned to the preacher when he (or she) provides an illustration? Because illustrations are stories that help us understand.17 Churches that structure the story as part of its purpose will benefit greatly; churches that do not will rob its people of reality and cut off its youth from examples that can shape their lives. Galatians 3:1 is a witness to the power Paul could muster in his preaching, and that power revolved around his ability to portray Christ publicly and effectively through the spoken story about Christ.
We can appeal to experience in our theological arguments. Blaise Pascal, in his famous Pensées, said: “People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others” (1.10). A disease that particularly affects my own discipline, academic theology, is an unwillingness (probably to avoid the appearance of popularity) to integrate experience into one’s academic work. But academic theologians ought to learn from Paul here: Paul was so astute theologically that countless scholars have spent their lives unraveling his letters and arguments so they can order their own thoughts biblically. Yet, for all his academic precision, Paul was also experiential in his approach.
How then should we appeal to experiences in ministering to others? Here I am simply assuming that Paul’s example is one worth emulating without being bound to following it rigidly. We would want, first of all, to appeal to experiences about which we are aware. While Paul clearly does not tell us how he knew about their experience as the preface for his appeals, it is also clear that he knew what he was talking about (cf. 1:6–9, 11; 4:13–15) and, because he knew about it, he appealed to it. Second, we should probably follow Paul in not making lots of appeals to experience. Paul’s appeals to experience as a crucial foundation for his arguments are infrequent. Third, we should probably infer the obvious and the compelling from experiences rather than clever and difficult-to-discern features. While I (individually) may learn from a specific experience something I think God wants me to know or learn, that does not warrant my dictating that same lesson for everyone who has a similar experience.18 Fourth, what we infer from experience must be in accordance with Scripture if we are serious about our Christian theology and the authority of the Bible.
So I believe we can learn from this passage that arguments from experience can be a part of our theological argumentation. Let us take the example of a young man who was raised in a Christian home, committed himself to Christ during his high school years, left home for college, enjoyed two good years of Christian fellowship at his campus, and who also, after two years of fighting the battles against sin and the flesh, announces that he has had enough of Christianity, wants to move into his girlfriend’s apartment and to participate in weekend beer parties, and overall desires to be morally unchecked. While I would not want for any reason to forget to pray through this and to remind him pastorally (i.e., firmly) of what God’s Word says about purity and the final ends of life in the flesh, I believe in this sort of situation it is wise also to appeal to his experiences: the disappointment of his loving parents, his college brothers and sisters, and his local church who have prayed for him for years; the joy he had experienced in conversion, fellowship, and Christian growth; the emotional maturity that develops in waiting for the timing of God’s partner; the sickening feeling that comes the morning after beer bashes; and the misery that will come to him (if he is a Christian) if he decides for an immoral lifestyle.
If we were able to take careful statistics of pastoral counseling and Christian ministry, we would, I suspect, be surprised at how frequently our appeals are to experience rather than simply to logic. In fact, as a college student I once attended a local lecture on philosophical logic by a world famous logician. He began his question-and-answer session with a statement to this effect: “You will discover, in real life, that people change their views, not as a result of logical reasoning, but as a result of arguments from authorities (if Billy Graham says so, then I believe it) or as a result of appeals to experience.” In the eighteen years since that lecture, I can think of very few statements I heard in college that have been more frequently fulfilled than that one.
But we cannot think our appeals to experience are all that we need. Contextual reading of Paul’s argument from experience shows that Paul did not stop here; he went on to arguments from Scripture and logic. And so should we. Our arguments from experience have no truth-backing if they are nothing more than that. They must be anchored in and carried out by appeals to Scripture and theological reasoning. Otherwise, we reduce our ministries to emotional appeals.
But I must also add that appealing to powerful experiences is the most forceful of appeals to experience. I include in such experiences our conversion experience (especially for those for whom it was somewhat dramatic), miraculous answers to prayer, and even outright miraculous events in our lives. Very few of our experiences are as powerful as these, and it is to such experiences that Paul appeals. We would be wise to appeal to these kinds of experience if and when we do appeal to experience.
The experience of conversion was the foundation for Paul’s entire appeal here. Had the Galatians not been converted to the truth of the gospel, Paul would never have written this letter. But conversion is not in vogue right now. Perhaps because of the excesses of the 1950s and 1960s with popular evangelism appealing to superficial conversions, or a backlash to the “I’ve Got It” and “Born Again” movements, or the embarrassing revelations of TV evangelists, or the desire of evangelicals to be intellectually and socially acceptable, we evangelicals are not emphasizing conversion as the only true foundation of a relationship to God. Our reactions are overreactions. These overreactions are also weakening our churches when we could be strengthening them.
In our previous section we examined the need to preach and teach justification by faith since that was the essential message of that passage. Here we see that the experience of conversion is the foundation for the whole passage. Thus, while justification by faith is a doctrinal formulation of the experience of conversion, we should not avoid repetition. We need to preach the necessity of conversion, we need to teach it in our Sunday schools and in our Bible studies, and we need to evidence it in our lives.
As we have hinted before, the experience of conversion is not some formula that every Christian repeats. Some people are suddenly and dramatically converted; others are converted over years; some can never remember when they were not Christians. For each, however, conversion is a necessity because no person can relate to God until that person surrenders the entirety of his or her person to God. That surrender is conversion. I know of no better collection of conversion stories than the one collected by Hugh T. Kerr and John M. Mulder.19 It would make a great adult Bible study topic to study this book and compare each conversion to teachings on conversion in the Bible.
Through such an attention given to conversions in the church and in the Bible, perhaps our churches will be encouraged with what is going on at the local level, and perhaps we will gain better clarifications of the nature of conversion required by God.