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Children of Grace
"Tell me, you who desire to be under the law, do you not hear the law? For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave and one by a free woman. But the son of the slave was born according to the flesh, the son of the free woman through promise. Such things are allegorical utterances: for these women are two covenants. One is from Mount Sinai bearing children for slavery; she is Hagar. Now Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia; she corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother .... Now we, brothers and sisters, like Isaac, are children of promise. But as at that time he who was born according to the flesh persecuted him who was born according to the Spirit, so it is now. But what does the Scripture say? 'Cast out the slave and her son for the slave shall not inherit with the son of the free woman.' So, brothers and sisters, we are not children of the slave but of the free woman" (Gal. 4:21-31; see also, Gen. 16:1-6; 21:1-7).
EVERYONE likes a story and there are no stories more familiar to the church than those found in the Bible. The surprising thing about this story is not its content but its context. Who would have expected an Old Testament story about the rivalry of two women to turn up in a letter like Galatians in which a Christian apostle is expounding the nature of the gospel? Is Paul simply indulging in a bit of rabbinic allegorizing? Is he simply grasping at straws to win an argument? Before we conclude that such is the case and that here the apostle's argument momentarily falters, there are certain questions we should ask and seek to answer. Why did the apostle write the letter to the Galatians in the first place? What is the argument all about and what is the point he is seeking to make? Is the issue one that is essential to the gospel as he understood it; and is it essential to the gospel as the church, especially the church coming out of the Reformation, has understood it?
I
As we seek to answer these questions, we are, fortunately, not beset with the kinds of problems that sometimes confront the interpreter of
Paul K. Jewett is Professor of Systematic Theology at Fuller Theological Seminary. His most recent book is Election and Predestination (1985).
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Scripture. We know that Paul wrote the Galatian letter, and its threefold structure-narration, teaching, exhortation (Lightfoot)-is generally accepted. We also know that it was written in response to a particular historical situation in the Galatian churches. Furthermore, we know what that situation was. To be sure, we don't know all we might wish we knew. Were these churches, for example, located in north or south Galatia? Just how were those whom Paul opposed related to those whom he had opposed at the Jerusalem Council (Acts 15)? Was the rivalry and tension created by their teaching already dividing the churches when Paul wrote, or was there simply a potentially divisive situation which he hoped to diffuse by his letter?
These are intriguing questions. But they are not questions which need to be answered unless one assumes that the Bible is simply a collection of source documents whose meaning is to be equated with whatever conclusions historical analysis may yield. Not that we would dismiss critical historical analysis altogether. If, for example, there were evidence, as some have argued, that Paul misunderstood his opponents or that they, rather than be, understood the gospel correctly, then, indeed, the theological content and authority of his message would be compromised. But since we see no convincing reasons for such conclusions, our interpretation of Galatians 4:21-31 is one which corresponds, in all its main features, to the traditional understanding of the passage.
According to this traditional view, Paul's opponents were Judaizers, that is, people with a Jewish background who understood Christianity in terms of their Jewish faith rather than the other way around. Hence they insisted that certain legal requirements of the Jewish law, particularly circumcision, must be observed if one is to enjoy salvation. One is not justified before God on the ground of Christ's righteousness alone, but only if one is also circumcised.
Paul perceives this argument to be a fatal blow to the gospel. According to the gospel he proclaimed, sinners are justified freely by God's grace through faith in Christ apart from the works of the law. This is the understanding of the gospel he is defending in the letter to the Galatians. Though written in response to a historical situation, his argument transcends that situation and has normative meaning for the church in all ages. To suppose that salvation is by keeping the law rather than by faith alone, a faith in Jesus Christ, through whom God justifies the ungodly, is to misunderstand the gospel in a fundamental way. The gospel is just the good news that we are justified apart from the works of the law by the grace of God who freely reckons Christ's righteousness to us as a gift received by faith.
Paul's opponents, rather than preaching law and gospel were preaching law instead of gospel. They defined the gospel in terms of the law rather than the law in terms of the gospel. That is to say, they understood the law as the means of justification rather than as a pedagogue until Christ came that we might be justified by faith in him (Gal. 3:28). Paul therefore meets them on their own turf. He, too, talks
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about the law. Specifically, he appeals to a well-known instance in their own Scriptures which illustrates how grace and works (gospel and law) confront us with an irreducible either/or. Those who desire to be under the law, do they not hear what the law says? It says that Abraham had two sons. However, though they were both his sons, the circumstances of their birth were so different that only one was recognized as the heir of the covenant promise while the other was rejected. The rejected son, Ishmael, was born "after the flesh," that is, as the result of human effort on the part of Abraham and Sarah because they really did not have faith in the promise which God had given them. They did not believe that Sarah would ever have a child. The Judaizers likewise lack faith in God's promise. They do not believe that sinners can ever be justified by grace alone. Therefore, they are undermining the faith of the Galatians by seeking to persuade them to establish their own righteousness in a way which is contrary to the promise of God, namely, by observing the law of circumcision.1
In contrast to Ishmael's birth, Isaac's was humanly impossible. But God by grace, and in keeping with God's promise, transcended this human impossibility. As a result, Isaac was born and the promise was fulfilled. Hence, Isaac was declared the heir of the promise. So it is now with those who are the heirs of God's grace. As Christians, saved by grace and not by their works, they are the children of promise, free from the bondage which the law engenders in those who seek salvation by keeping it.
The truth, which Paul illustrates with the story of Hagar and Sarah, escapes its times, as we have said, and speaks in every age to those who hear and heed the text even though they are in quite different historical circumstances from the original Galatians. For example, more than a thousand years after Paul wrote his letter, Luther concluded his preface to Galatians with the observation that the doctrine of justification by faith "can never be taught, urged, and repeated enough. If this doctrine be lost, then is also the doctrine of truth, life, and salvation lost and gone. If this doctrine flourish, then all good things flourish; religion, the true service of God, the glory of God, the right knowledge of all things which are necessary for a Christian to know." And it was Luther's preface to Romans, where he expounds the same doctrine, that was being read some two hundred years later at Aldersgate when John Wesley "felt his heart strangely warmed" and went forth eloquently to preach the gospel of free grace which has changed the lives of millions even down to the present day. So this text speaks to men and women who are alike strangers to the Hellenistic culture of the first century in which Paul and the Galatians lived, the Germanic culture of the sixteenth century in
1See Rom. 10:3-4. Many of the Jewish people, according to the apostle, though they had a zeal for God, "being ignorant of the righteousness that comes from God and seeking to establish their own, did not submit to God's righteousness. For Christ is the end of the law, that everyone who has faith may be justified."
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which Luther lived, and the English culture of the eighteenth century in which Wesley lived.
II
As we reflect on the process by which we arrived at the above interpretation of the text, we must acknowledge straight off that we do not believe there is any such thing as a completely objective, assumptionless hermeneutic. The effort to approach the Bible in this way leads, in our judgment, to a fundamental misunderstanding of its message. Underlying such an approach is the Enlightenment assumption that the accidental truths of history stand in contrast to the absolute truth of reason-as Lessing reminded us. Thus the Bible, "objectively" interpreted, becomes the source of historical information that is to be evaluated in the light of autonomous human understanding.
Given such an approach, the Bible can confront the interpreter with nothing really new since the Bible is a part of history and history simply discloses manifold variations on the common theme of human possibility. All past events are understood in terms of the historian's present experience, which defines historical possibility. And so the alleged objectivity of the critical historical method becomes a subjectivity of the most blatant sort. As a result, the Bible is no longer read as Scripture. It does not confront the reader with a "thus says the LORD," but simply informs the interpreter about the life and thought of those who lived long ago. Such an enlightenment approach closes the gap between the "then" of the text and the "now" of the interpreter by simply imposing the historical consciousness of the interpreter on the text. In this way, the text is brought into the present, but it is a present in which all that happens has a causal, this-worldly explanation.
By contrast, we have approached our text with the assumption that, as part of the Bible, it is the word of God inspired by the Spirit who moved both holy men and women of old as prophets in Israel as well as the heralds of the gospel at the time the church was founded. In brief, we have approached our text as Scripture.
This fundamental assumption of the church that the Bible is to be read and heard as the word of God carries with it, or better, contains in itself, another assumption, namely, the assumption of the underlying unity of the Bible. Such an assumption faces one with a question: Was the church correct in understanding itself as the heir of Israel's covenant and therefore having a claim to the Jewish Scriptures?2 Is the God who is revealed in Jesus Christ the God of Israel? The way we have
2When we speak of the church as the "heir of Israel's covenant," we mean the church enjoys the blessing of the covenant along with, not instead of, Israel. While the church has repudiated Marcion, it unfortunately has never rid itself of anti-Semitism. Harnack would have done well to reserve some of the encomiums granted Marcion for his German Jewish compatriots.
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interpreted our text presupposes that the answer to these questions is "yes."
But then, how do we understand the unity of the Bible when there is obviously such a difference between its parts that the church itself speaks of the Jewish Scripture as the "Old Testament" and the Christian Scripture as the "New"? Obviously such adjectives as "old" and "new" are rather sharply antithetical. Besides all this, there has developed a broad, scholarly consensus, from the time of Semler, that the biblical documents should be investigated as individual, historical sources rather than as documents together constituting a normative, theological statement. As a result, the Bible is perceived as reflecting contradictory perspectives-Old Testament priestly religion contrasts with the ethical monotheism of the reforming prophets; the gospel of Jesus reflected in the Gospels is quite different from the gospel about Jesus in the epistles, and so forth. Here our choice is not as sharply drawn as in the previous instance. We accept the validity of the so-called higher critical approach to the documents of Scripture; and in the light of this approach we acknowledge that the unity of Scripture cannot be reduced to a linear resolution. While there is definite merit in the notion that the Scriptures set forth one covenant differently administered to Israel and the church (Calvin, et al.), and while one may rightly underscore the historical continuity of salvation history in terms of "promise" and "fulfillment" (Cullmann, et al.), one can hardly suppose that such approaches are adequate in themselves in the light of the results of a critical analysis of the biblical data.
There is no way, to be specific, to harmonize Old Testament prophecies, in their literal meaning, with the Jesus event viewed as the fulfillment of the Old Testament. One might as well try to harmonize the view that Messiah is the Suffering Servant of the Lord with the expectation in Jesus' day of a political Messiah who would overthrow the Romans. Recognizing this fact, the writers of the New Testament frequently allegorize the data of the Old Testament. Apart from such allegorizing, the fundamental unity of Scripture could not have been maintained by the ancient church; the diversity between the Testaments would have become absolute and Marcion's "antitheses" prevailed.
Allegorizing, understandably, has had a bad press ever since the Reformers rejected the medieval allegorizings of the Roman Catholic Church and insisted that the text be interpreted according to its plain intent. "Allegorizings," fumed Luther, "are awkward, absurd, invented, obsolete rags.3 But there are not only bad but also good allegorizings, as Protestants tacitly acknowledge when they recognize the validity of the "typological" or "spiritual" interpretation of the Old Testament. Theologically speaking, there is no difference between an allegorizing and a typologizing of the text. When the author of Hebrews, for example, speaks of the original tabernacle as a "copy" and "shadow" of the
3Quoted by Farrar, History of Interpretation (New York: Dutton, 1986), p. 338.
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heavenly sanctuary (8:5), or when Paul declares that the rock from which Israel drank in the wilderness was Christ (I Cor. 10:4), they are doing the same thing as is done with the Sarah/Hagar story in Galatians 4:21 ff. The problem is not with allegorizing as such, but with allegorizing that rests on no true analogy between the original meaning of the text and the new meaning given the text. It was for want of a genuine analogy that the early church did not follow Philo in allegorizing the Old Testament in terms of Greek philosophy. There was no univocal element between the two, that is, between the original meaning of the text and the allegorical meaning given it.
III
Allegorical (typological, spiritual) interpretation may be defined as the interpretation of one thing in terms of another. Such interpretation, to be legitimate, must, as we have said, rest on analogy, an analogy between the original meaning of the text and that in terms of which it is interpreted. There must, in other words, be some univocal element of meaning between the two.
Paul's allegorizing of the conflict between Hagar and Sarah in terms of the conflict between law and grace is, in our opinion, an example of legitimate allegorizing for it rests on a genuine analogy. The univocal element in the analogy can be clearly stated. As Ishmael was born of human effort, so the Judaizers are seeking righteousness by human effort. And as Isaac's birth was the result of God's gracious act in fulfilling his promise, so it is with the people of God. By their birth of the Spirit, they become children of the promise, members of Christ's body and citizens of the "Jerusalem which is above."
Paul equates Hagar with Sinai because the law, by which the Judaizers were seeking righteousness, was given at Sinai. Of course, Paul did not endorse such a legalistic understanding of the law, for it would have made the law work against the promise and so destroy the unity of revelation. Nor should we suppose that when, in other places, he sharply contrasts the New Covenant with the Old, which he calls the "written code that kills," a "dispensation of death" (II Cor. 2:6f.), that such polarity means he has abandoned the unity of Scripture altogether. He speaks rather, in all these passages, in terms of a legalistic misunderstanding of Scripture; his argument is an ad hominem one. Reading the law with a veil over their minds (11 Cor. 3:14-15), Sinai becomes for unbelieving Jews (and Gentiles as well) a ministration of death. From such a misunderstanding of the law, Paul had been delivered by the grace of God through faith in Christ. Thus, Christ had become for him the "end of the law"; the end of the law, that is, as a means of justification before God (Rom. 10:4).
The allegorizing of the Sarah/Hagar story is a striking particular case of the way in which the Old Testament is understood generally in the New. When the church accepted the Christian Scriptures by adding them to, rather than substituting them for, the Jewish Scriptures, it
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related the two by analogy. Christians came, first, perhaps, in the Alexandrian school, and then generally, to speak of the "analogy of faith," meaning that the faith taught by the apostles is analogous to that taught in the Old Testament. This is the thought implicit in Augustine's cryptic remark, "The New is in the Old concealed, the Old is in the New revealed."
The univocal element in the analogy is God's unique and gracious act of salvation. Coming in grace to Israel, making a covenant with them, so God also comes in grace to all, Jew and Gentile alike, fulfilling the promise of the covenant in the Jesus event. In this event, anticipated in the Old Testament and proclaimed in the New, God, in the person of Christ, secures the benefits of the covenant for all the covenantees through Christ's obedience, death, and resurrection. God's act of saving grace, then, is the univocal element in the analogy which justifies the New Testament interpretation of the Old in terms of something else, namely, the Jesus event. Of course, such an approach to the unifying-diversity of Scripture is an act of faith. But it is not a faith which defies all reason- only autonomous reason which will accept no truth it cannot discover for itself.
This New Testament interpretation of the Old acknowledges that everything in the Old Testament, for all its variety, centers in the relationship of Yahweh to Israel, a relationship secured by a covenant made in God's goodness (grace) and freedom (election). While a legal understanding of the law is possible from within the Old Testament itself (as in Orthodox Judaism), such an understanding is no longer possible once one has encountered Jesus Christ as did Paul on the Damascus road. Then a new interpretation, to which the Old Testament is open as a possibility, becomes for faith a necessity and a certainty. Seen, therefore, in the light of the Jesus event, the church does not discard the Old Testament, but accepts it as newly understood in Christ.
All the human family, like Israel, has rebelled against God and broken covenant. The law, then, can only make the world-Jew and Gentile alike-guilty before God (Rom. 3:19). But in the person of the Son, God has assumed the consequences of this disobedience and so, by obedience, shown the law to be holy, just and good (Rom. 7:12). Hence, the gospel can never be heard apart from the law rightly understood. The choice is not a choice of law or gospel, but of law and gospel, a choice which the church has made in its acceptance of one Bible in two parts. In other words, as Christians, we hear the voice of God in the Old Testament in the way we have heard it in Jesus Christ.
IV
We have sought to interpret Gal. 4:21-31 in a way that would give us its historical meaning and its existential meaning, that is, its meaning for those to whom it was originally written and for those who, through the following centuries, have read and heard it preached as the word of God
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(Luther, Wesley, et al.). It is our conviction that an adequate hermeneutic is one that seeks the convergence of the "two horizons" (Gadamer), that of the text in its original setting and that of those who hear it today.
At the human level, the primary bridge whereby God's word is brought out of the past into our present is preaching. Preaching is not simply an explanation of the text, as though the text were all important and the explanation incidental. For the Protestant and evangelical, to be sure, Scripture alone is the norm of preaching; yet preaching itself participates in the revelatory process. We do not read that it has pleased God "through the inerrancy of Scripture," but rather "through the foolishness of preaching" to save those who believe (I Cor. 1:20).
When Paul says to those who demand a sign and ask for wisdom, "we preach Christ crucified" (I Cor. 1:23), he does not mean that the Jesus event is simply an event in the past which he describes in vivid detail to all who will listen. Christ's crucifixion is not like Hannibal's crossing the Alps or Caesar's crossing the Rubicon. It is a past fact, to be sure, but not simply a past fact. Rather it is a fact in and as it is proclaimed in the present. Of course, the fact that is proclaimed can be researched in a neutral, objective way and thus certified to have happened. Then it becomes "true" in the sense of a correspondence between the event and the mind that hears of the event (adequaetio rei et intellectus). But the concern of preaching is not simply to inform; it aims at encounter with the Crucified One. Anyone can understand (as information) the text, "And when they came to a place that is called Calvary, there they crucified him..." (Lk. 23:3 3). But one does not understand this text, in the Christian sense of understanding, until one responds, "we are convinced that One has died for all, therefore all have died. And he died for all, that those who live might live no longer for themselves but for him who, for their sake, died and was raised" (II Cor. 5:14-15).
Such engagement tends both to overcome the distance between the hearer and the text and to correct the pre-understanding with which the hearer comes to the text, insofar as that pre-understanding impedes one's hearing the Spirit who speaks through the text. It is in such engagement that one not only understands the words of the text but understands the word through the words of the text. And so the Spirit makes "the preaching of the word an effectual means of convincing and converting sinners and of building them up in holiness and comfort through faith unto salvation" (Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q. 88).
Our stress on public proclamation serves not only to underscore the church's ongoing task of preaching but also reminds us that the saving understanding of the text, to which the individual hearer is brought, is not a private affair. The meaning of the text is not simply a meaning to which I come as a private individual, a meaning "for me"; it is rather a meaning "for us" (pro nobis). My salvation, indeed, is my salvation; but my salvation is embedded in and draws its meaning from the larger context of the salvation history of God's people, the church, in all ages.
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Not simply what has happened to me, but what has happened to all the people of God, at Calvary, on Easter Sunday, on the day of Pentecost, in Galatia. In fact, all that happened leading up to these events- the son given to Abraham and Sarah, the Exodus under Moses, the restoration under Ezra-all are the larger context which gives meaning to the sentence, "I am redeemed."