Ikon Community

Today we begin our series on the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Galatian Christians.

Along with the letter to the Romans, Galatians is widely considered one of the two most important letters written by the Apostle Paul. These “books” in the Bible contain his strongest statements of theology concerning God’s plan of redemption for the world through Jesus Christ. As a result, the arguments and language of Galatians can be densely packed and difficult to grasp. To make matters even more difficult, there have been sharp disagreements about how to interpret and understand the finer nuances of Paul’s theology, and those disagreements have possibly become more strenuous in the last 15 years than they have ever been.

However, there is no reason we can’t read this letter together, and – with some diligent attention to the Old Testament narrative on the one hand and the first-century backdrop on the other – fully grasp Paul’s message to the extend that we are able today (we are always advancing in our understanding of theology, and we can expect that to continue).

Still, this will require some work on our part and it is well worth the effort.

Paul’s letter concerns nothing less than the meaning of the Christian “good news” or gospel, so this is something we must endeavor to get right. We’ve spent the better part of the last year reading through Christ’s teachings, ministry, death and resurrection, and as we move on to Paul’s letters we should bear in mind that some popular renderings of the Christian gospel (such as “Accept Jesus into your heart so you can be ‘saved’ and go to heaven when you die” or, Joel Osteen’s “Let Jesus help you live your best life now” or political pundit Glen Beck’s recent articulation of the Christian gospel, “It’s all about you“) owe much to historical readings of Galatians and Romans, but they bear little resemblance to Jesus’ message of the Kingdom (see Matt 4-7, Matt 13, and Matt 25:31-46).

This apparent distance between Paul’s message and Jesus’ message is something we’ve inherited from the Reformation. 500 years ago the Protestant Reformers saw Paul’s strong emphasis on “salvation by grace through faith alone” as a powerful critique (and rightly so) of certain Catholic doctrines and practices that had no grounding in scripture. This Reformation emphasis, however, filtered through Enlightenment philosophies in the ensuing centuries, has only widened the apparent gulf between Jesus and Paul, leading some prominent contemporary theologians to conclude that Paul simply invented a new greek-influenced religion on top of Jesus’ death – a religion, they assert, that has nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus.

This problem is not merely academic. Despite 500 years of strong emphasis on “salvation by grace alone through faith” in Protestant churches it is widely recognized today that the Western Church bears little resemblance to Jesus (the Catholic Church and Orthodox Church fare no better). Unbelievers have noticed too. As one recent book title puts it, They Like Jesus, But Not the Church.

So, one way to attempt to move past the weak or thin versions of the gospel mentioned above is to try to grasp how Paul’s teachings do, in fact, build faithfully on the gospel of the Kingdom that Jesus proclaimed and demonstrated. This means we will need to dig a little deeper than normal, and perhaps ask some uncomfortable questions about our understanding of the gospel that reveal our own Enlightenment prejudices.

Again, let me say, it is well worth the effort. If we, as a small group of Jesus followers, do not grasp the depth and breadth of the good news that Jesus brings to the world we will be of little use to ourselves or anyone else. For the next 8-10 weeks, I’m asking you to make sacrifices in order to grapple with this letter from Paul. Work less. Spend less time watching television or surfing the internet. Spend less time at the gym. Whatever it takes to carve out an hour or so a day to seriously engage with the gospel of Jesus Christ that Paul is articulating.

No matter what you currently believe about the gospel, I can nearly guarantee that Paul’s breathtaking revelation of Jesus’ gospel will turn out to be a bigger, more surprising, perhaps more scandalous, and definitely more powerfully relevant to “real life” today than you realized.

A final word on what to expect from the format. Over the next 8-10 weeks we will gather on Sunday nights as usual and read through a portion of the text and engage with its meaning (we started last night by reading Galatians 1:1-2:10). Every Monday through Friday between gatherings we’ll engage with daily readings that help is dig a little deeper than we’re able on Sunday nights.