Introduction: Legalism Then and Now

THE MODERN, WESTERN READER always collides with the cultural context of the Bible. This collision is routine experience for the one who wants not only to read the Bible well but, more importantly, who wants to make the message of the Bible relevant to our world. It will not do to think that we and the Bible inhabit the same cultural, intellectual, and social world. There are too many differences, too many years, too many miles, and too many social upheavals.

Listen to words of a modern pastor and world-renowned Christian who, perhaps more than any other contemporary, has been used by God to show Bible students everywhere how God speaks from his ancient Word to our modern world:

These sane, and entirely accurate, remarks of John Stott express the foundation upon which this commentary is built: to interpret the Bible requires an ability to study two horizons—the ancient horizon and the modern horizon. Furthermore, it requires people who desire to bridge those contexts and make the ancient one speak forcibly to the modern one. This process is performed every time a Christian claims that God has spoken to him or her through his Word. And I believe this happens daily to anyone who listens to God’s Word. But I also believe that such an event requires patient observations about the biblical texts and critical discernment of our age. I also know that this maneuver is made by Christians with rarely a reflection upon what is actually going on. This process, both conscious and unconscious, will come to the fore in the pages that follow.

Earlier in the same book, Stott described the entire process in the following category:

There are at least three conversations going on simultaneously in this kind of double listening. First, we must be conversant with the ancient world, especially the Jewish world, to understand what God was saying at that time. Second, we must be conversant with our culture—with our economical world, with our political world, with our moral world, with our emotional-psychological world, with our intellectual world, etc. And third, we must be conversant with the changes in our culture. What God said to your parents and mine is probably different than what he is saying to you and me and to our offspring. I am not suggesting here that somehow the gospel has changed. No, the gospel of Jesus Christ is that God brings his love into our lives by his grace through Jesus Christ, and we need simply to respond to him to find that grace. However, the particular crystallizations of that gospel change from generation to generation because our social perceptions change from generation to generation.3 And the sensitive interpreter of the Bible who wants to make God’s Word relevant to our world will be engaged in this conversation of cultural change at the same time he or she interprets the ancient text and our modern world.

It has been said of Karl Barth that he believed the pastor was the one who held the Bible in one hand and the daily newspaper in the other—and it goes without saying that, while the Bible never changes, our newspapers do. This means we need to have cultural sensitivity as we seek to speak to our world today about the good news of Jesus Christ. In the pages that follow, then, I shall consistently attempt to delineate the ancient context as well as the modern significance of the Word of God. In such a move, however, I shall also attempt to explain how we move from the one to the other. This introduction attempts to move the whole message of Galatians from ancient Turkey to modern society.

Original Meaning

THE ORIGIN OF Paul’s letter to the Galatians is well known: after Paul had evangelized the southern districts of Galatia4 successfully and established some churches during his first missionary journey, he returned to Jerusalem (cf. Acts 13–14). While there he caught wind of some Jewish Christian teachers who infiltrated these Galatian churches with a polluted message that was, according to Paul, endangering the entire gospel. For two millennia we have referred to these intruders as the “Judaizers.” This term will be used throughout this commentary to refer, not to Jews in general, but to a specific movement in earliest Christianity that believed conversion to Christ also involved a further conversion to their (Pharisaic) form of Judaism.

Before Paul could get off on his second missionary journey (cf. Acts 15:36–18:23), and just before the Apostolic Council of Acts 15, Paul sent this urgent and emotional missive to Galatia with the prayer and hope that it would straighten out the Galatian churches. What happened to the Galatians and how they received Paul’s emotional letter, we simply do not know. What we do know is that this letter, penned probably in the late 40s of the first century, has given both life-transforming instruction and heartfelt admonition to the church for nearly two millennia.

The problem of the letter to the Galatians is also well known, at least in its general orientation. In a word, the problem was Judaizing legalism. But legalism is a tricky term that gives rise to many fashionable applications tailored no doubt to our contemporary churches, and it is here that we first encounter the need to be sensitive both to the ancient world and to our own world. To show the particular angle of this commentary, I will immediately dip into the problem of application. For example, for some people modern-day legalism is the institutional legislation of any specific Christian practice—say, mandatory weekly (or biweekly!) church attendance, a total prohibition of smoking or alcohol consumption for pleasure, separation from ungodly people, overt affiliation with a particular political party, commitment to particular political activities, or the use of a specific translation of the Bible. While the New Testament clearly contains commandments for Christians, some believers think the legislation of anything is modern-day legalism; after all, it is argued, we (Christians) are to be led by the Holy Spirit.

For others, there is a perception that while some specific Christian mores are wholesome and worth legislating, others are left to the individual believer, with all the ambiguity such freedom may create. This so-called “Christian freedom” has given rise, particularly among the Protestant free churches in the United States, to a multitude of emphases and factional interpretations. One needs hardly mention the sad state of affairs produced by local factions in the church, factions that often seem to be rooted in the call to individual freedom as seen in the life and legacy of Martin Luther.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves, for before we can determine just what legalism is today, we must determine what legalism was then. Application must always follow exegesis and exposition of the Bible. Jumping the gun in Galatians—that is, finding applications of Judaizing legalism in our modern Christian framework before discovering what Paul had in mind—has led to a sad preoccupation of Christian leaders with the Roman Catholic church as the major application of Galatians.5

I will argue in what follows that this frequent Protestant interpretation and application is, almost always, a serious misunderstanding both of Galatians and how we should apply Galatians today. So here we must go through Galatians carefully to see what Paul has in mind when he is criticizing the Judaizers. As will be seen, the problem Paul sees in the Judaizers is more than legalism, and in this sense the term legalism is not totally satisfactory for describing the problem. However, in light of its widespread usage in the Church, I shall continue to use that term but try to provide a more accurate sketch of what Paul has in mind. What does Galatians teach us here?

Legalism Then—or, Was It Legalism?

TO INTERPRET A biblical book properly means investigating the text in its context. That is, if we want to understand the book of Galatians, we need to know something about the course of Paul’s life (cf. Acts; Gal. 1–2), about the nature of his opponents, and about the impact of his world (both Jewish and Gentile) on his own ideas and his expression of those ideas. Thus, it is good if we can learn something about Paul’s religious, social, and cultural contexts, for everything about Paul is related to those realities. The same applies to us. If I were to say to someone “Jump in the creek,” the context determines whether this is a slur (as you might say to someone you are arguing with) or a simple directive (as I might say to my son so he can fetch my golf ball). In other words, before we can understand Galatians we need to know what Paul is fighting against. In the past, Paul has been understood to be responding to a “works-righteousness” religion, much like the Roman Catholicism Martin Luther faced in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. “On this view, what is at issue between Paul and his opponents is a matter of pure theology and pure theory: they debate the merits of two rival answers to the question, How can man be accepted by God?”6 This approach assumes that the issue is purely theoretical; it is a theological problem. Others, more numerous today, contend that the theological debate is only one dimension of a larger debate that involved both theological and social issues, both theory and practice, both religion and culture. We must emphasize that the only way to interpret the letter correctly is to understand it in its context. So we need to examine what Paul was criticizing before we start applying it to various groups today.

Before going through the evidence, I offer a definition of legalism according to what we find in Galatians: Legalism, according to Galatians, was a religious system that combined Christianity with Mosaism in a way that demanded total commitment to Israel’s law as the climax of one’s conversion to Christ. This “deeper commitment to the law,” according to Paul, was a subversion of the adequacy of Christ’s work and an abandonment of the Holy Spirit as God’s way of guiding Christian ethics. In other words, the legalism of the Judaizers is more than a problem: it has become a new message, a different gospel. As I shall show below, it is this implication—that it is a different gospel—that forces Paul to action.

It takes little convincing to show that the concern of the Judaizers was primarily with the law. Thus, in a central passage of his argument, Paul asks: “Did you receive the Spirit [the sure sign of conversion] by observing the law, or by believing what you heard?” (3:2). The answer is clear: the Galatians knew they had received the Holy Spirit as a result of believing, not as a result of obeying the law. Further, Paul asks in the same section, “Does God give [notice the change to current experience] you his Spirit and work miracles among you because you observe the law, or because you believe what you heard?” (3:5). Again, the answer is clear: the Galatians know from their experience that God grants miracles as a result of faith, not as a result of some legal practices. But Paul goes further in describing the Judaizers’ essential view: “You who are trying to be justified by law have been alienated from Christ; you have fallen away from grace” (5:4). In fact, “All who rely on observing the law are under a curse” (3:10). Clearly, the Judaizers were a law-centered movement in that the law was the central focus of their religious orientation.

We must also point out that the Judaizers Paul faced were not (or did not see themselves as) opponents of Christianity. By the use of a subtle term in Galatians 3:3 Paul says that the Judaizers were seeking to supplement Christianity—better yet, perfect or consummate Christianity—by adding the specific laws of Moses. Paul says, “After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort?” (emphasis added). The Judaizers saw their message as Jesus Christ plus Moses, not just Moses, not just Jesus Christ. It is like telling a new convert from a Billy Graham Crusade today that he or she must also become Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, etc., before the conversion process is truly complete and acceptable to God. When this sort of thing takes place, the message itself is changed; it is no longer “surrender to Christ” but “join our group.” The focus of salvation shifts from Christ to movement.

But these concerns of the Judaizers about the law take on actual and specific form: they were concerned primarily with circumcision (2:3; 5:6; 6:12) and Jewish food laws regulating not only what was kosher but also with whom one was permitted to eat (2:11–14). These are the two major concerns of the Judaizers as presented in the evidence of Galatians.7

We also need to argue here that the Judaizers were not just law-centered but that their legal concerns had a definite nationalistic-racial basis; this underlay everything that was going on between Paul and the Judaizers. Their concerns were not just theoretical or ethical: Obey the law! Rather, their concerns were nationalistic, highly pragmatic, and social: Obey the special laws that mark off the Jew from the Gentile. In other words, we are looking at a form of cultural imperialism. In reading through Galatians we will see that whenever Paul gets specific about the law that the Judaizers were pushing, he does not do so theoretically. The Judaizers’ concern was more than “you converts must submit to Moses.” Instead, we find that their concerns were with specific Jewish laws: “You converts must be regulated by those special concerns (we) Jews have that separate us from the Gentile world.” It is true that Jews saw these very commandments as tantamount to the entire law, for it was through these social laws that Jews expressed their commitment to the law—similar to the way in which some Christians see their giving of a tithe to their local church as a vibrant witness to their total submission to God and so turn it into a commandment of massive consequences, to the point that those who do not tithe are seen as either spiritually inferior or even apostate.

Two of these well-known (to Gentiles) Jewish laws concerned circumcision and food purity, two religious regulations that have almost no bearing on contemporary Western society. True enough, we Westerners are intoxicated by dietary restrictions (low cholesterol and fatty percentages), but these are not what Jews had in mind. They were concerned with living according to Mosaic law in such a way as to live honorably before God. Contamination of food had nothing to do with diet; it had to do with one’s general fitness before God. What we see as diet, they saw as piety. To be sure, circumcision is performed on the vast majority of boys born in the United States, but clearly this is not a religious rite: it is performed because it makes good sense for health. Thus, for us to understand Paul’s directives we must understand both the religious dimension (these things are understood to be mandated by God) and the social dimension (these things reflect commitment to one’s Jewish heritage) of these laws. The Judaizers saw their entire religion and society at threat in Paul’s supposed “law-free” gospel because he was allowing people to find God’s grace without becoming socially conformed to the law.

These observations have many implications for our interpretation of Galatians. For one, the argument of Paul gains a racial-social nuance and not just a theological one. In contesting the Judaizers, Paul is contesting not just theological variation but theology that serves social and racial interests. The Judaizers were not simply converting others; they were nationalizing others. This needs to be explored as we read through Galatians. Paul was also opposed to what we now call cultural imperialism (the view that one culture is superior to another), and this cultural imperialism had become enmeshed in a religious system.

In addition to the law, Paul states that the Judaizers’ system was human-oriented and fleshly. Whether Paul has Moses in mind (which is possible) or simply the traditions of the Pharisees (which I think is more likely), he has something profound at the bottom of his argument: the religious system of the Judaizers is not from God, is not based in the revelation of Jesus Christ, and does not depend on the Holy Spirit. The letter itself begins on a polemical note in this connection: “Paul, an apostle—sent not from men nor by man, but by Jesus Christ” (1:1). He implies already here that the Judaizers are sent “by men”—undoubtedly the Jerusalem leaders. Further, Paul says he is not seeking the approval of humans (1:10) while he, we must suppose, thinks the Judaizers have the wrong source of approval (6:12). More radically, Paul lines up this human-centered message of the Judaizers with the flesh, a term that has no positive implications. “After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain perfection through the flesh?” (3:3; see also 6:8).8 The return to Moses, i.e., to the Jewish laws, is not an addition; rather, it is a subtraction of all that is important: Christ and the Spirit. To live before God apart from Christ and without the Spirit is to live in the flesh. Thus, the Judaizers have a fleshly system. The system is one of “addition by subtraction”—adding to the gospel by subtracting the sufficiency of Christ and the Spirit.

It is commonly understood here that Paul is talking about effort, about “works righteousness.” Put differently, when Paul asks, “Are you now trying to attain your goal through the flesh?” (3:3), he is talking about a persistent religious problem: the problem of humans trying to please God through their own efforts, sincerity, and works. Ernst Käsemann, a noted German scholar, asks this: “What does the Jewish nomism against which Paul fought really represent? And our answer must be: it represents the community of ‘good’ people which turns God’s promises into their own privileges and God’s commandments into the instruments of self-sanctification.”9

This view has an entire set of assumptions about Judaism that have rarely been tested by the evidence of Judaism itself. These assumptions include: that Jews thought God’s will was to be found in the law of Moses, that they had to follow it completely to be accepted by God, that the sacrificial system was not of much use when it came to the forgiveness of sins, that this created a crisis or burden of conscience before God, that this led to the development of a view of merit in which the good works would outweigh the sins and so provide acceptance before God, that this system did not make for healthy people emotionally and psychologically, and that therefore some of the Jews were thrilled when the message of salvation by grace was revealed in Jesus and Paul. In other words, these people think that God will accept them if their good works outweigh their sins. Furthermore, many who argue for this view of the problem Paul is facing are the first to argue that most of these Judaizing legalists did not even know this is what they were arguing. The question we must ask is: Is this a fair description of either Judaism or the Judaizers?

I believe nearly every one of the assumptions in the previous paragraphs is wrong. I also think this is grossly inaccurate, and one notable scholar, E. P. Sanders, has argued persuasively that this view of Judaism and the Judaizers is more indebted to our perception of Martin Luther’s personal struggles with the medieval Roman Catholic Church than to our knowledge of Judaism. I have read vast amounts of literature from Judaism, including most of the published material found at Qumran (the Dead Sea Scrolls), the Old Testament Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, hundreds of published papyri, and a multitude of sections from rabbinic writings. I am more than ever convinced that Judaism was not essentially a “works-righteousness religion” in the sense defined above. Christians can read Jewish literature with great profit, particularly the Babylonian Talmud. What we find there is that Jews throughout the ages have always been convinced that they are God’s elect people, that they were “saved” because they are God’s elect people, that they were to try to live by the law (and most did), that the atonement sacrifice set up by God through Moses remedied the presence of sin in their lives; furthermore, they believed that the final judgment was a judgment of works. Thus, they believed in salvation by covenant participation, knew that God had imposed upon them an obligation to keep his laws, and were convinced that God would judge them according to their deeds.10 The simple reason why Jewish documents emphasize morality is that acceptance with God was for them not the issue; that was promised to the people of Israel from the days of Abraham on. What mattered to them was how to live as the people of God, and there was much debate over that.

Now what is important here is to realize that Jesus, Paul, and the writers of the New Testament teach nearly the same thing: (1) that salvation is by God’s grace (but in Christ) and the result of his election, (2) that salvation implies an obligation to live according to God’s will or in the Spirit or in submission to the commandments of Jesus (Matt. 28:20), and (3) that the final judgment will be a judgment of works (cf. Matt. 25:31–46; 2 Cor. 5:1–10; Rev. 20:11–15). The polemical language we use of Judaism as a “works righteousness” would be amazingly foreign to Paul. In Galatians, when Paul speaks of “through the flesh” he is not talking about “efforts to gain salvation” but about attempting to live before God without depending on the Spirit. Put differently, he is talking about how we are to (or not to) live before God as Christians, not how we become (or do not become) acceptable before God as humans. It is simply inaccurate, not to say religiously insensitive, to describe Judaism as a works religion.11 Thus, the issue in Galatians was not works righteousness versus grace righteousness, but the relationship of Christianity to Judaism, the relationship of the larger world of believers to the narrower world of the Jewish nation. Francis Watson puts it well: “The essential issue in Galatians is thus whether the church should be a reform-movement within Judaism or a sect outside it.”12

Our final point about legalism is that it becomes a total system (5:3) that ends up nullifying the grace of God in Christ and the power of God in the Spirit (2:21; 5:2, 4, 16–25). In effect, it becomes another gospel (1:6–9); but this “other gospel” is one that cannot save. By opting for Jesus plus Moses, the Judaizers, Paul argues, are destroying the need for Christ. Paul states clearly that “if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing” (2:21), and that “if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no value to you at all” (5:2). With respect to denying the power of God in the Spirit, Paul says: “If you are led by the Spirit, you are not under law” (5:18). That is to say, those who opt for the Spirit choose against Moses; those who opt for Jesus choose against the law. One cannot have both. Paul’s message is uncompromising: Christ alone.

We see, then, that the Judaizing legalism that Paul faced at Galatia was a religious system that combined Christianity with Mosaism in a way that demanded total commitment to the law, particularly as the climax of one’s conversion to Christ. Paul shows that this “deeper commitment to the law” undermined the work of Christ and rejected the sufficiency of the Spirit for determining Christian practice. Accordingly, it is illegitimate for us to focus simply on the “legal” aspects of the Judaizers. These teachers had created a different gospel, the Christ-plus-something gospel. In our attempts, then, to move into our society with Paul’s letter we may miss many applications if we restrict his message to the anti-legalism theme as frequently described and applied. What Paul was opposing was the perversion of the gospel expressed by the Judaizers in their Christ-plus-something gospel. The legal features happened to be the particular contributions the Judaizers added when they altered the gospel; but it was the alteration of the gospel that Paul opposed, not the addition of legal elements.

Paul’s Argument

HOW DID THE Jews see the law, and how does Paul respond to their view? This multifaceted question has been answered in three main ways in the discussions of the church. The first view, the principle of salvation view, contends that Jews and the Judaizers saw the law as the means of salvation and that Paul opposed it as a principle of salvation, because, so it is assumed, the Judaizers did not understand their inherent sinful nature. Thus, according to this view, the Judaizers were trying to get the converts at Galatia to embrace the law so they could be accepted by God. This view of the Judaizers, I believe, is only partly correct. Then it is argued that Paul responded to this by arguing that humans cannot, because they are sinful and weak in the flesh, obey the law. So, if they embrace the law as a principle of salvation, they are asking for big trouble: damnation. But this view of Paul’s response, I believe, fundamentally confuses the points if it is given emphasis.

The problem here is that there is a list of assumptions implicit in the view that are neither Jewish nor taught by Paul (and if he does, he does so rarely that this view must be subsidiary to his argument). The primary assumptions (and false ones) are that Judaism thought one had to keep the law perfectly in order to be accepted by God and that the sacrificial system did not take care of the problem of sins. As a matter of fact, no Jew thought the law was impossible to keep because they knew it could be kept; and when not kept, atonement could be made so one could be restored back to the level of a law-abiding Jew. Paul is not lying in Philippians 3:6 when he says he kept the law: he kept it, and when he sinned, he went to the temple to take care of his transgression.

The biggest problem with the “principle of salvation” view is that Paul is not seen in Galatians attacking this kind of problem. The issues involved here are far more practical: they are social and they are theological. What we see is Paul squaring up against those who thought one had to become a Jew in order to become acceptable to God. For this reason, the Judaizers thought one had to submit to the law to be fully acceptable to God; but Paul’s response is not along the lines that merit-seeking is the problem. Again, Paul is not fighting off the problem of motivation: he is not asking, “Do you do the law in order to be saved?” and then attacking those who arrogantly think they are good enough to please God.

To be sure, Paul did see the Judaizers as thinking the law was necessary for salvation, and he knew they were adding it to his message. But his argument is not, “You misunderstand human nature,” but, “You misunderstand what the law is given for.” Thus, Paul does not appeal to the biblical view of human nature to counter their views; instead, he appeals to the biblical view of the law. They misunderstood the purpose of the law, not the ability of humans. They were every bit as realistic about human nature as Christians have been through the ages: humans sin and need God’s forgiveness. What are we to make of the temple if it is not the tacit confession that humans are incapable of perfect obedience to the law? If this is the orientation of the temple, then Paul would never win his argument if he pursued the idea that the Judaizers should see that no one could be sinless.

A second view, the salvation-historical view, contends that Jews saw the law as an abiding revelation of God’s will, which Paul saw as now eclipsed in the coming of Christ. This view is solidly taught in 3:19–25, where Paul shows that the law had a limited purpose (to reveal sin) for a limited time (until Christ came). Thus, Paul argues against the Judaizers that they should not be foisting the law on these converts because the era of God’s will being revealed through the law is over. The time under which we now live is guided by the Spirit of God. I believe this view is correct but is not completely correct. Thus, the Jews thought the law was God’s will (which Paul would agree with—tongue in cheek) but Paul thought that the “law as God’s will” was now an era that was eclipsed by God through Christ and in the Spirit. This second view needs, however, to be supplemented with the third view.

The third view sees the Law as a social and nationalistic boundary marker. This view contends that the Judaizers saw the law as God’s gift to the Jews (which it was), that God has always worked through Jews (which he had), and that this means God was still working only through the Jewish nation (which he was not). Thus, they argue, one must embrace the law as necessary if one wants to be acceptable to God. And the laws that they focus on are the major social boundaries between Jews and Gentiles: circumcision and food laws. This view of what is going on in Galatians is also partly correct and helps us as we proceed through Galatians. For these Jews, the law was essentially a special contract between God and Israel, and this meant Jews were special; to be acceptable to God, they would have argued, means one has to become a Jew.

So, what is going on in Galatians is that the Judaizers did not change with the times; they failed to see that when Christ came, the era of the law ended. They could not accept this because they thought God worked through the Jewish nation to dispense the promises of Abraham (the third view). Paul’s argument is salvation-historical (the second view): in God’s plan of history the law has now served its purposes, and therefore it is wrong to follow it and to demand that Gentiles accept it. That leads to his sociological argument: it is wrong to think God still works in nationalistic ways. God’s people now comprise individuals of all sorts from all nations.

Paul’s letter to the Galatians is a polemical letter, designed from front to back to be both a rebuttal of the Judaizers and a positive statement of the apostolic gospel. His argument moves on three levels: an autobiographical account of the origin of his call and gospel (1:10–2:21), a theological argument of the finality of the law in Christ and the adequacy of the gospel of grace in Christ (3:1–4:31), and the practical application of his letter to show that God’s new life is to be found in living in the Spirit (5:1–6:10).

What Paul found wrong with the Judaizers, then, was (1) they did not understand the sufficiency and universality of Christ’s work, (2) they did not understand what Christ and the Spirit have done to the Mosaic law and its national character, and (3) they did not perceive that God has granted the Holy Spirit to all believers (Jew and Gentile), with the result that Christians do not need to be guided by the law and do not have to live in the flesh; instead, they have the Spirit to guide them in ways that conform to, fulfill, and transform the law.

There are two options: one can choose either Christ or one can choose Moses.13 A chart illustrates the options:

Christ	Moses
Spirit	Law
Spirit	Flesh
Faith	Works of the Law
Promise	Law
Blessing	Curse
Freedom	Slavery
Mature Sonship	Slavery; Infancy
New Creation	Circumcision/Non-circumcision
Grace	Law
Christian Church	Jewish Nation

Outline

Before discussing how we should move forward to our day with Paul’s message, it might be helpful to the reader if I provided a brief sketch of the social context of Galatians.

Historical Reconstruction

In Jerusalem there were several currents of Christianity, the two major parties being the progressive Hellenistic wing (out of which Paul came) and the conservative Hebrew wing (out of which the Judaizers came). There can be no doubt that the conservative wing put pressure on the progressive wing to conform to the Jewish law, and this pressure was exerted because of a common Jewish context. And conversely, the progressive Hellenistic wing no doubt had its vocal proponents for a more liberalized form of Jewish Christianity where the temple cult and purity laws were not seen as crucial.

As I said, Paul came from the progressives. As Paul began his mission in the Diaspora, he immediately found that the gospel was powerful and that scores of Jews and Gentiles were converting to Jesus as the Messiah. In addition, these Jews were less socially conventional than the Hebrew Christians and typical Jews of Jerusalem. This different social context allowed the new converts to accept and work out a gospel lifestyle that was less law-centered. And so they did—in ways quite unacceptable to the Jews of Jerusalem. Here is where the tension began: the law-abiding Jews of Jerusalem heard about the “lawless” Jewish and Gentile Christian converts of the Diaspora and began to put pressure on the conservative wing of the Jerusalem Christians. We must understand that the concern of the Jerusalem Jews was probably not with the law per se but with the boundary markers that these new converts were willing to abandon. They came to the conclusion that the new converts to Christianity were not Jews at all if they were not willing to live according to the basic Jewish distinctives. Their conclusion: pressure the conservative party to engage in an active proselytization of these new converts to get them to conform to the law. And so the conservative party (called “men … from James” at 2:12) sent out some Judaizers to “follow-up” the evangelism of Paul.

It is also possible that the Galatian converts were feeling a little insecure about Paul’s moral guideline: live in the Spirit, live in freedom, etc. Their conversion was a conversion (in most instances) from pagan lawlessness to what was perceived to be a Christian lawlessness. It is likely, I think, that they began to feel the need for laws and regulations, particularly if some of their members were beginning to drift a little in the direction of indulging the flesh. The Judaizers, thus, had a perfect “in” with the Galatian converts.14 The efforts of the Judaizers were no doubt partly successful. We are probably justified in seeing Paul’s concerns with divisions (5:15, 20–21, 26; 6:12–13) in the churches as related to the Judaizer’s efforts. Some of the converts were converting to Judaism now and others weren’t; there would have been lots of rhetoric, heated rhetoric, in such a context. Paul feared the creation of two denominations: Jewish Christianity and Gentile Christianity.

Paul, who was already more progressive to begin with, reacted with strong emotion to the mission of these Judaizers because he saw in their attempts: (1) an attack on the adequacy of Christ (2:21), (2) a misunderstanding of God’s plan for the law (3:19–25), and (3) a capturing of the gospel by a national and racial message (a rejudaization of the gospel; see above). From Acts 15:36–41, I infer that Paul’s letter had some success.15

Bridging Contexts

I INDICATED ABOVE that moving immediately from the word legalism to modern Christian practices is a potentially misleading application of Paul’s message. While legalism may express itself normally in moral rules, it is not moral rules as such that Paul opposes. It is the transformation of the gospel into something more than Christ alone.

The specific legal issues that were apparent in Galatia must be left to the side if we wish to make progress in applications. That is, it goes without saying that there are probably no Christian groups, churches, or movements that explicitly demand circumcision as necessary for conversion or that restrict table fellowship on the basis of interpretations of Old Testament levitical instructions. This means we are seeking to apply Galatians only to analogous situations today. But in moving to these applications we must be sure that they perform the same functions that legalistic practices played at Galatia.

It must be remembered that in the very letter in which Paul hotly contests legalism, he also says that “in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value” (5:6). Paul did not simply deny the value of circumcision here; instead, he denied the inherent value of both statuses. We must also remember that it was this same Paul who had Timothy circumcised when Paul needed him for ministry among the Jews (Acts 16:3). Apparently, Paul thought that at times circumcision would be valuable for ministry; at other times it would be detrimental to ministry. But what Paul is against is the necessity of circumcision for conversion and social identity. So before application takes place, we must reflect on the role circumcision and food laws played at Galatia. And here we find the foundation for our applications.

Paul was not against good things; he thought the law was good, he thought circumcision was good, and he probably thought eating kosher food was a good idea. From the New Testament itself we learn that Paul himself lived according to the Jewish calendar (cf. Acts 20:16) and occasionally took on himself Jewish vows (see Acts 18:18). If these things could be performed without causing offense or if these things needed to be done in order to reach Jews, Paul was for them. But, if these things were done as a necessary supplement to faith in Christ, then Paul was diametrically opposed to their practice. He was against the legalism of the Judaizers because it usurped the work of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit and forced all converts to become Jews. It was not what was done that rankled Paul; it was why these things were done that produced his quick reaction.

Here is Paul’s principal argument against Judaizing legalism: whatever practices detract from the all-sufficiency of Christ and the enabling ministries of the Spirit must be opposed; whatever practices build walls between people who believe in Jesus Christ must be torn down; whatever practices seek to supplement trust in Christ and dependence on the Holy Spirit must be cleared away; whoever seeks to demand any such things must be countered. In effect, whatever message that is not Christ and the Spirit alone is a perversion and must be radically denounced.

In addition, our point must be stated positively, for Paul goes on to state his views in positive form as well (5:1). Paul is for any practice that encourages the freedom of the Spirit to operate among Christians (5:13). Paul is for an ethic that is characterized by love: “The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love” (5:6; cf. 5:14). If asked about the essence of Christian living Paul would say: “So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature” (5:16). Paul’s solution to Christian holiness was not self-mortification (though he believed in that, too) or more reading of sacred books: he knew that holiness came only through God’s Holy Spirit. And here is the essence of Christian living to Paul: living in Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. When a person lives in the Spirit (i.e., under the total guidance of God’s Spirit), that person does everything God wants, and so the law cannot condemn that person. When a person lives according to the leading of the Spirit, that person will always do the fullness of God’s will, of which the law of Moses was but a preliminary glimpse.16

The essence of Christianity, then, is straightforward: it is not living by the law; it is living in trust in Christ and depending on the Holy Spirit. The Judaizers were wrong because they sacrificed Christ and the Spirit on the altar of Judaizing legalism.

Contemporary Significance

TO FIND CONTEMPORARY analogies to the legalism of the Judaizers we need to find more than identical features (circumcision, food restrictions, calendars) of regulated behavior among Christians. We must be in search of practices and features of modern Christianity that debunk the sufficiency of Christ and relegate the Holy Spirit to a non-essential feature of Christian living. We must become systems analysts, examining what we teach to see if it roots everything in Christ or whether it has traits of the Christ-plus-something system.

I begin by poking around among mainline Protestant ideas that, while not written down in creedal form, do seem to be typical of what passes off as Christian for many groups. I recently had a friend tell me about her unfortunate experience in such a church. She was, in her own words, a “mild evangelical with fundamentalist roots.” She began to worship in a mainline denominational church and found immediate acceptance. She liked the social climate, the educational level, and the warmth of the people. She eventually was asked to teach an adult Bible class that met weekly, and it was in this setting that she began to feel uncomfortable. She found, as a result of pressure from the pastor—who did not attend the classes but heard about her biblical teaching from others—that she “did not belong” in their church. She found that there were two themes in her pastor’s gospel: (1) love, defined ambiguously as “God loves all,” but without reference to the cross of Christ; and (2) American fundamentalists are wrong, dangerous, and to be avoided. Because she was quite sincere about the Bible (and knowing her, I know she was sensitive and diplomatic about how and what she said) and because she was challenging her class members to take the message of the Bible with utter seriousness, she was branded as a “fundamentalist” by her pastor.

What she experienced over the next couple of years was social ostracism and a refusal to allow her gifts to be exercised in a setting that needed her and her ministries. She came to the conclusion that even in liberal Protestantism, there was a “fundamentalism of liberalism” and that fundamentalism was charged with peer pressure against any Christian who took seriously the biblical teachings of Christ and Paul. She found that to be a member of that church in a functioning way, she also had to agree to all kinds of political, economic, and ideological themes—themes with which, while she respected them, she had some problems. Put differently, she felt that to be a genuine Christian in their eyes she had to become like them—regardless of whether or not that image was in conformity to Christ or the Scriptures. What struck her, upon further reflection, was this church’s neglect of teaching about Jesus Christ and an almost complete void of believing that the Christian life was life in the Spirit. Jesus was for them a profound person and the Spirit was a mystical oddity. I suggest this example is not dissimilar to the Judaizing controversy at Galatia, where conformity to one’s group was more important than any revelation from God about Jesus Christ or the Holy Spirit. In criticizing this mainline denomination, I am not suggesting that all mainline Protestant churches are of the same weakness; nor am I suggesting that evangelicals ought not to be worshiping in liberal churches. What I am pointing out is that it is not just fundamentalism or evangelicalism that is susceptible to the same sins as found by the Judaizing legalists of Galatia. What we are looking for in applying Galatians are strands of Christianity where the adequacy of Christ and the sufficiency of the Spirit are held in check by other ideas and social movements.

We might continue by observing that the evangelical church in the entire Western world is now in a post-legalistic era.17 Since the late sixties and early seventies it is not only our society that has changed; along with this change, the moral makeup of the evangelical movement has been dramatically altered. Prior to this time the church lived comfortably in a fairly settled and uniform society that had (at least) an externally Christian ethic as its moral guideline. After the social revolts of the sixties and seventies biblical morality and social norms have separated themselves significantly. Prior to these revolts the evangelical movement was still largely expressed in Protestant fundamentalism, and that movement was a reaction to the growth of liberalism in American society, culture, and mainline denominations. Furthermore, the ethic of large portions of Protestant fundamentalism was admittedly legalistic, rigorous, socially restricting, and self-conscious. This ethic has been significantly changed by social changes and by some serious reflections on the nature of the Christian life. The evangelical movement itself is an attempt to cut loose from the legalistic and antagonistic moorings of fundamentalism.

My own spiritual biography reflects this very movement. I was reared in a Protestant fundamentalist home and church, both of which emphasized the ethic of legalism. For whatever reasons (and I cannot detail but one of them here), my own convictions about how Christians are to live changed along with the development of the evangelical movement. I am persuaded that the leading voice in my own development is the letter of Paul to the Galatians. This change in the church from a legalistic to a post-legalistic era makes the interpretation and application of Galatians more difficult today. It is simply no longer adequate to talk about smoking cigarettes, attending movie theaters, and drinking alcohol, and to think that in talking of these things one is talking about how to deal with legalism. These features are no longer seen as central to the identification of the evangelical movement (formerly they were), and we are left now with questions on how to apply Galatians. In fact, the modern evangelical movement is caught up so much in Christian liberty, a lack of accountability, and individualism that any talk about legalism can sound like a foreign language.

However, if our perception of Paul’s essential points is correct, namely, that Judaizing legalism was wrong because of its weakening of the centrality and sufficiency of Christ and the Spirit, we are left with all kinds of applications—in all contexts of the church in the Western world. Christ has been pushed to the side and the Spirit has been neglected as much in evangelicalism as they have been in the German state church, the Anglican communion of Great Britain, and the mainline denominations of the United States.

In addition to a revision of how we have looked at the so-called legalism of Galatians, we are also dealing with massive changes in society. Before we can apply Galatians we must grapple both with the text of Galatians in its historical context so we can understand God’s message, and with our modern culture and church so we will know how to apply that message of Paul. Before we proceed to the commentary we need to sketch just what “Judaizing legalism” is in its essential manifestations today. I am concerned here, then, with the basics of application.

First, in attempting to apply Galatians we are primarily looking for practices, attitudes, and theological views that add to the gospel in such a manner that (1) the sufficiency of Christ is compromised, and (2) the centrality that the Holy Spirit plays in spiritual freedom is jeopardized. As already stated, we are not looking in our churches simply for chafing rules or binding regulations. Rules may in fact be good for spiritual development. The rub at Galatia was that the addition of required obedience of Moses to conversion made the sacrifice of Christ unnecessary or at least insufficient. In other words, the legalism at Galatia was more “heresy” than it was the addition of binding rules. This form of legalism was a contamination of the gospel. And our quest today must be for contaminating influences and perversions of the sufficiency of the gospel. “Legalism” will be manifested in such distortions of the gospel.

A word of emphasis needs to be given to the value of rules, regulations, and disciplines in spiritual development. These rules are pronounced by some to be the telltale signs of “Judaizing legalism.” There are few Christians who will contest the view that consistent prayer, Bible reading, meditation, and regular fellowship with other Christians are fundamentally important disciplines for spiritual growth. One of my greatest blessings as a seminary teacher is the contact I have with students who were InterVarsity campus leaders at American colleges and universities. In my regular conversations with these students I have heard a frequent chord: we struggle with newly converted college students in getting them to develop consistent spiritual habits. And local pastors will be the first to affirm the need for Christians, young and old, to practice spiritual disciplines. What I am saying, then, is not that disciplines, rules, or regulations are wrong. Rather, I am saying that when we seek to apply Galatians we need to find perversions of the gospel, and that sometimes these will be evident (as they were at Galatia) in rules and regulations.

So what are we talking about in these “additions”? What are some “rules and regulations” that might become similar to the Judaizing legalism of Galatia? Of what could be a long list, I mention four. (1) At times laws and regulations are added in such a way that they distort the gospel as they relegate Christ and the Spirit to the periphery. When, for example, because of a hectic schedule as a result of a busy family, one finds it impossible to read the Bible in the morning (or evening, or both!), and as a result one feels unloved by God, distant from him, or in need of forgiveness, one has distorted the gospel. We are loved by God in Christ, we have been brought near to God in Christ, and we have been forgiven in Christ; Bible reading does not make us relationally closer to God. However important the discipline of Bible reading may be, that discipline does not make us acceptable to God. We have compromised Christ and sacrificed the power of the Spirit on the altar of a discipline if we think we cannot live spiritually without reading the Bible every day. Other such “laws” easily develop in Christian circles.

(2) At times experiences become the essence of a relationship to God, rather than trust in Christ and life in the Spirit. For some it is an experience of speaking in tongues, for others it is a vision, and for others it is simply mystical prayer or the rapture of the soul with God in prayer; and for still others it may be protest against a nuclear storage site or a commitment to a particular political agenda. Again, while each of these experiences has played an important role in the history of the church, and while each may be spiritually transforming for some, when these experiences become the very center of one’s relationship to God—without which the person feels distant from God or out of sync with his will—we are compromising Christ and the Spirit of God. We dare not preach, teach, or even insinuate that we are more acceptable to God if we have certain spiritual experiences. Dale Bruner, in his large study of the Holy Spirit, speaks of Pentecostalism too often leaning in this direction of an experience being the “fullness” of the Christian gospel, a fullness that ends up supplanting Christ. He states:

(3) At times one’s education is seen as fundamentally important to acceptance with God, and these displace Christ and the Spirit as the crucial identifying markers. Here we are not talking simply about degrees, whether from colleges, technical schools, or seminaries. We are talking about the message given at times in Christian circles of the necessity of education and intellect in order to be really in tune with God’s will. I once heard a pastor say that “the dumbest farmer grows the best potatoes.” While I doubt this principle can be proven to be true in each case, this quote does illustrate our point here, namely, that education is not the necessary route to success or to living God’s will. How does this “legalism” manifest itself? Frequently our graduates are accused of attempting to turn churches into seminary classrooms. While we may applaud the effort of a young minister to pass on his or her enthusiasm for study and theology, we also have to point to what is often enough a grievous error here: theology may be important but education is not the only path to living before God with integrity. A local church, while it educates, is more than an educational institution, and when education becomes a necessary ingredient for true spirituality, then acceptance with God on the basis of Christ and life in the Spirit is compromised.

Again I emphasize, various disciplines, experiences, and education are not wrong. But when these things usurp the roles of Christ and the Spirit, then they are fundamentally wrong because they distort the gospel.

(4) Sometimes it is cultural imperialism that finds its way into the hearts, eyes, and ears of the listener of our message. Whether it is racism (especially in places like the U.S. and South Africa), or simply cultural snobbery, sometimes people sense that what is being preached is not Christ, not life in the Spirit, but life according to our customs and according to our heritage. Rarely is this the reflected view of the preacher or evangelist; much more often, however, it is the perception of the one being evangelized. At times, however, what comes across is that one must become white or an American or a European in order to be fully acceptable to God.

As a result of these four major ideas that creep into our gospel presentation and end up being “additions”—and therefore legalism, because they supplant Christ and the Spirit—it is no wonder that Roman Catholicism is not the primary focus of our attention. That movement within the Christian church is only one possibility. There are so many other areas for our exploration of applications. To be sure, at times the Roman Catholics have added to the gospel, but so have Protestants, in other ways. It is unfair to our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters to pin the whole book on them. A closer reading of the letter shows that the issues are far more normal and far more complex than this one application.

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A second manifestation of Galatian legalism needs to be brought in here. I believe that these kinds of additions inevitably lead to an overemphasis on performance as the means of acceptance with God and how we maintain our relationship with God. I am not talking now about “works righteousness” in the form presented above. Rather, I am speaking of the things added to the gospel becoming the central things because they distinguish themselves socially and personally. If a group focuses, say, on experiences, then that group quickly becomes defined by those experiences, and individuals wanting membership in that group seek those experiences. The result is inevitably an overemphasis on those things. More often than not, these experiences are associated with performances. Soon it is performance that becomes the means of acceptance with the group and therefore with God. This means that life in Christ and in the Spirit are no longer the means of acceptance with God or the community; when this happens, we see a “Judaizing legalism” in our world. The leading (and socially defining) question for this kind of group is this: “Have you ever done this?” or, “Has this ever happened to you?” However important performance is in our relationship to God, it is not the means of God’s acceptance of us. Christ has done all we ever need. The emphasis upon these performances, I suggest, blurs our vision of God’s work on our behalf in Christ through the Spirit.

I have seen such “group dynamics” take place in the church for various performances. I have seen such take place for the political activity of stubbornly boycotting an abortion clinic by conservative evangelicals or for the political agitation of protesting places for military registration; and I have been in small groups where, if one had never spoken in tongues, one did not feel like one was “fully up to snuff.” This kind of pressure on people will make them want to “perform” such things in order to be accepted to the group because such acceptance is perceived as what God wants one to do to be acceptable to him. Thus, we find in current examples of Judaizing legalism an inevitable emphasis on performance and a corresponding lack of trust in Christ and dependence on the Spirit.

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Third, a Galatian legalism usually develops barriers between people groups, races, denominations, and opinions. These barriers are not simply “Christian options” but true barriers to mutual fellowship. They are human constructions that particularize what one group believes is God’s ordained will for human beings. They become social rules regulating behavior for all in the group. At Galatia, the Judaizers believed (I’m sure with full integrity) that God wanted these new converts to socialize into Judaism—and in so doing they would relieve the pressure at Jerusalem on the conservative party. But Paul saw these social rules (table fellowship, circumcision, etc.) as barriers to fellowship and as human constructions contrary to God’s will. We must remember that the social rules we create are not simply options. We give off a message by our social conventions, namely, that this is God’s will for all. What happens in this manifestation of legalism is that the essential message becomes “join our group” and not “live in Christ.” The necessary requirement for full conversion becomes “join our church” rather than “surrender to Christ.” The current fracturing and splintering of the church is abundant evidence of the presence of an unnecessary group mentality in segments of the church. While at Galatia it was the age-old (to us) distinction between Jew and Gentile, this same group mentality manifests itself today in lines drawn between races (e.g., blacks and whites), sexes (women and men), and denominations (e.g., Methodists and Southern Baptists).

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Fourth, contemporary Galatian legalism inevitably develops a judging mentality based upon its own concerns. While the intention may have been originally sound (circumcision will offend few people; Wednesday evening church attendance is good for spiritual development; protesting nuclear sites shows one’s commitment to the gospel of Jesus, the King of Peace), inevitably others will be judged on the basis of one’s performance of these social rules now understood to be God’s will for a particular group (and if for us, why not others?). Judgmentalism is a sure indicator of Judaizing legalism and seems to grow naturally in its dark corners. But judging others without regard to Christ and the Spirit leads to serious errors and a distortion of the gospel. Our first question might instead be: “Can we share the Lord’s Supper together?” If so, perhaps we can erase some of our lines.

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Fifth—and this must be emphasized both for Paul and us—current displays of Galatian legalism’s concerns are almost never wrong and never bad. What is inherently wrong with circumcision? Nothing, Paul says (5:6). What is wrong with eating only kosher food? Nothing. After all, God prescribes it especially for the priests, and it can’t be wrong for all to seek to live in that degree of purity. What is wrong with limiting or prohibiting alcohol consumption? Nothing. Surely, the world would be a better place if alcoholism would end and if drunk drivers would cease to end the lives of innocent victims. Furthermore, there are precedents of commitment in the Bible that suggest that total abstinence of alcohol is at least one of God’s wise ways. Thus, it must be kept to the fore that the concerns of Judaizing legalism are not bad. Christians must be the first to see this: legalism’s concerns are almost always with practices that, neutrally seen, are not at all harmful and can be a positive good. The problem, however, is that these “good (but quite neutral) concerns” supplant the greatest concern: life in Christ and the joy of the Spirit.

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Sixth, a regular feature of Judaizing legalism is that it goes beyond Biblical prescriptions. Let us take the issue of table purity that so concerned the Galatian Judaizers. Clearly table purity,19 at some level, is taught in the Old Testament. After detailing the items that may not be eaten by the covenant people, God tells the Israelites that they may not eat these things for a reason: “I am the LORD who brought you up out of Egypt to be your God; therefore be holy, because I am holy” (Lev. 11:45). The purity demanded of the priests is even more intense (Lev. 21–22). Some first-century observant Jews obeyed not only the Old Testament laws but also the development and applications of these laws as taught especially by the Pharisees. In general, Jews did not eat unclean foods (Acts 10:14) and refused to eat at table with Gentiles (Acts 10:28). In fact, biblical scholars today agree that the Pharisee movement was a purity movement at some level: a group of zealous Israelites who sought to apply some of the Old Testament priestly laws and other extensions of the law to the everyday world of normal people in Judaism in order that the people of Israel would be holy before God.20

It is this zeal that gets us back to our point: in their zeal to obey the law, these Pharisees often went beyond the law. In fact, in going beyond the law these Pharisees thought they were protecting the law from being broken. There developed the notion of “building a hedge around the law”: if the law says, “Eat in the temple precincts in total purity,” then the hedge would be constructed away from that by saying, “Always eat in purity.” In saying this, the following becomes operative: If you always eat in purity (the hedge), you will not break the law of temple purity. That is, if one obeyed the interpretation, one could never break the law.

It is precisely here that legalism becomes apparent: in going beyond the law, legalism develops other laws that become just as binding—all in an attempt to protect the law from being broken and to provide for the covenant member a certain ease of obedience. But if God’s law is “temple purity,” then we are wrong if we construct a law more rigorous. If we take the Bible to be God’s Word, then we can trust that God knew what he was doing. His moderation must become our moderation. While in a previous point I argued that legalism’s concerns are almost never bad, here I am arguing that legalism’s concerns become instinctually wrong-headed (though not necessarily bad in concern) when they go beyond the law in attempting to protect the law. If God in his infinite wisdom did not think total separation from unbelievers was proper, then it is wrong for us to think total separation is God’s will—as has been unfortunately done in sectarian movements. What happens here is a serious distortion: the love of God for people is held at bay by a desire to perform certain kinds of behavior.

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Finally, I describe something I label as reverse legalism. For many legalists it is implied that in not breaking the law one has necessarily obeyed the law. One hears such things as: “I did not break the rules, so I must have obeyed the rules.” As love of my wife is more than “not divorcing her” or “not hating her,” so obeying God’s will is much more than “not breaking his laws.” Obeying God is a matter of the heart and involves a total orientation of one’s self; not breaking the law can be done accidentally, it can be done out of a bitter heart, and it may be done without any desire for God’s glory. But legalism develops far too frequently the tacit assumption that not breaking a law is being a law-abiding person.

In applying this to our day, I make only a few observations. Let us take a fairly rigorous movement (and perhaps one that hardly exists anymore), one with a singularly authoritarian pastor and a set of rules that includes: tithing one-tenth of gross income, no movie attendance (developed in the direction of no R-rated movies for the home VCR), no consumption of alcohol, regular attendance at all services of the church, reading the Bible only in a prescribed version, active involvement in the pro-life movement, religious and theological separation from the mainline denominations in the community, and no divorce for leaders in the church (including Sunday school teachers and choir members). What we need to see here is that one could be actively committed to each of these practices (none of which is bad in its essential concerns) and one could, at the end of the year, take stock and conclude that one has not broken any of the “social laws” of the church. I am personally persuaded that the person who so evaluates himself (or herself) will inevitably also think that he or she has been God-fearing and obedient to the will of God for the entire year. What I am contending is against this: a person could live life according to these practices and miss the will of God entirely because one can live a life of not breaking these rules but never live a life in the freedom of the Spirit. I am also more than convinced that a person could live according to these rules and also live within God’s will,21 although that person may need at times to flex on these rules because of the leading of the Lord. My point is simple: not breaking laws is not identical to obeying God’s will.

Applying Galatians to our world today is the heartfelt need of this book. Applying it properly is the thrust. It is my contention that Paul is against practices performed by Christians that detract from the work of Christ, that neglect the absolute need for the Holy Spirit, and that erect social boundaries between people that don’t need such boundaries. Paul is opposed to ideas that threaten the purity of the gospel. The commentary that follows will seek to apply that concern of Paul to our day. May God in his grace guide us in the ministry of his Word.

Now Read This

IN THIS SURVEY of the message of Galatians and areas for its application in our modern world, I have introduced several new ideas, and I wish to lay them before the reader in a more concise (definition-type) form. I will look at three such terms or expressions.

Legalism. Legalism here is taken to be Judaizing legalism, and Judaizing legalism is adherence to the law of Moses as a necessary step in being pleasing to God. But legalism is not simply adherence to, and insistence upon, certain rules. Rather, what is wrong with Judaizing legalism is that it supplants Christ and the Spirit. Judaizing legalism is wrong because (1) it does not understand that Christ and the Spirit are the fulfillment of Mosaic law and, therefore, the law of Moses now belongs to the former era, and (2) the Judaizers who are pushing this legalism are forcing Gentiles to be Jews. These two arguments form the basics of Paul’s argument against the Judaizers. They neither understand the Bible nor the universality of the gospel. In defining legalism, and Paul’s countering of legalism, in this manner, I need to make it clear that Paul is not countering the simple addition of rules to the gospel as being motivated by a human’s propensity to justify oneself before God. Paul is not attacking motives (merit-seeking or self-centeredness, etc.); rather, he is attacking an unbiblical perception of the role the law played in history and the nationalistic impulses of these Judaizers.

Works of the law. Again, we are dealing here with practices performed by the Judaizers that are in conformity to the law of Moses; what makes them wrong is that they are done in such a way that the practitioners are claiming that Christ’s work and the Spirit’s guidance are insufficient for daily life. But with the coming of Christ and the gift of the Spirit, the revelation to Moses has been fulfilled and is no longer the primary revelation of God to his people. “Works of the law” is an expression that emphasizes the word law, not works—especially if by works one wants to emphasize merit-seeking and self-centeredness. One thing that makes “works of the law” wrong, then, is that they are actions dictated by a law that has now been supplanted by Christ and the Spirit. Thus, they are “old-fashioned ethics.” Furthermore, “works of the law” is a description of particular Jewish practices that erect boundaries between Jews and non-Jews; it is a description of “nationalistic righteousness.” What makes them also wrong, then, is that they are social instruments for separation, not a revelation of God’s will for all people, Jew or Gentile.

Flesh. Flesh is frequently understood in conjunction with works of the law as the “self-motivated expression of a person who wants to be justified before God on the basis of performance.” But this is not as accurate as we need. What Paul means by “flesh” is a life lived before God without dependence on the Spirit. Thus, it is “un-Spiritual” living rather than “merit-seeking life” as such. Flesh, then, naturally aligns itself with the law because the one who wants to be governed by the law is the one who refuses to live in the Spirit and without dependence on Christ.

Text and Commentary on Galatians