Canter Bridge

We have only scarce evidence regarding the shape of Paul’s personality, yet his temperament must have exuded a certain feistiness. It was doubtless an unpleasant thing to discover that one had crossed him. What looks from this distance like an irascible edginess must not be taken as a transparent defect but rather linked, at least in part, to his impassioned jealousy for ‘the nations’ or ‘the gentiles’. When he articulates his own vocation in the letter to the Galatians, he defines it in these very terms, sketching out the boundaries of an embassy ‘to the nations’ that stands over against, say, Cephas’ calling ‘to the circumcision’.

The hot-tempered letter to the Galatians is driven by the sense that a hard-won liberty is on the verge of becoming lost. The partisans of narrow passages, it seems to this apostle, have while his attention was elsewhere clawed back ground in the region of the Galatian churches. The understandable impulse to discern the shape and scope of God’s mercy to gentiles almost exclusively in terms of how he has shown himself faithful to his Jews has experienced a surge. Its self-evident logic and power of persuasion have moved intelligent men and women to doubt that the promise—Paul returns time and again to this abbreviation for immediate, merciful grace to non-Jews—can find its way into gentile lives without the plumbing of Torah and its obligations.

Paul, in consequence, is incensed.

The force of his counter-argument leads him to one of the most quotably radical statements to be found in the whole of the New Testament:

As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.

Paul has gone behind nearly two millennia of Hebraic/Jewish encounter with YHWH to insist the gentile women and men can in their appalling spiritual naiveté encounter the God of Jacob unrehearsed.

Abrahamic is as Abrahamic does, reasons Paul. His apostolic gadding about has provided sufficient glimpses of what he calls the outpouring of the Lord’s spirit upon unwashed pagans to convince him that there is more than one way to Abrahamic trust. How to make this claim without diminishing the splendor of YHWH’s wrestling with his people and the literary/theological legacy that it has placed under the feet of worshippers—the term is not an exaggeration—of the Galilean messiah will occupy his lifetime.

For now, he has one thrusting, unbrittle point to make: in the light of Jesus’ taking on the ‘curse of Torah’, no one need remain alien to YHWH’s expansive embrace. All, if they want, are in.