"To the churches of Galatia"
Paul, an apostle sent from God, to bear witness to the resurrected Christ writes to the churches of Galatia. Does this make this text something relative, something contingent, something old and distant?
Our context has changed. We are not the Galatians. Our culture has changed. How can we know that Paul would say the same thing to us? This is an excuse. Yes, we must listen to the world around us. We must love and care, as Christ teaches us. But we must not succumb! God will transform us. We must not dare to suggest that we must transform him.
No. God is unchanged. Humanity is unchanged. Christ is still raised and through the apostle calls people to follow him.
God has chosen a particular time and place in which to reveal himself. This cannot be for us a problem. This must be a joy and a blessing. We stand in the same relationship to this God as Paul's first readers. How can we know this? Only by hearing the Word of God.
In this letter we receive a concrete sign of the love of our God. It is consistent with his nature. This God did merely talk or encourage or wish, but acted and concretely. He did not consider it beneath him to enter this world in Jesus Christ and to walk and die under our curse.
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4 comments:
How would it change what you say here by thinking of Paul as writing to the Church, of which we are still a part? Would that be a way to hold together the historicity and the ongoing message? Would that get us anywhere? Meaning: has our culture (assuming we are in the church) changed that much? So, instead of appealing to an unchanging humanity, appealing to a changing, though constant, community called into being by the Holy Spirit?
It is true, of course, we are part of the Church. In that sense we have received grace. We are saints.
But the troubling aspect would be to presume upon that as though our identity - our righteousness - in the Church was something we now owned for ourselves and so that God was somehow now irrelevant. This seems to me to be a present problem!
The first of Luther's Ninety-Five Theses springs to mind: the entire live of the believer is to be one of repentance.
Consequently I think we can see a continuity between that Church and ourselves ... but the continuity must not be understood in terms of an institution. It must only be understood in terms of the likeness of our humility, need, reception of grace and gratitude.
I didn't mean to imply that the community is the church as an institution (though this is only a bad term if abused!); I simply wanted to point out that the same God who called the church into being still sustains her day by day through, for one, the letters of the apostles, through which the Holy Spirit continues to speak to the Body of Christ. Hence, we are in some sense the same audience Paul originally wrote to. Does that help? I think a focus on humility and on repentance is built into the notion of church I am here presupposing as continuous with Paul's audience.
"Hence, we are in some sense the same audience Paul originally wrote to."
Hmm. I sense a problem with my reheated Barthianism.
I think that the analogy between them and us must be in defined in terms of their and our relationship to God. We have the same relationship of reception to God as they did.
I want to be cautious of the language of Church because I don't want to posit it as an item existing in the same way as God does.
There are, I suppose, two problems. One of ontology and one of epistemology. Ontologically, the Church exists because it has been brought into life by her Lord. The nature of this existence, is, so to speak, one of free-fall. The Church doesn't exist because it can support itself. There is nothing the Church can grasp hold of, no branch or cloud which it might reach for can support her weight. It lives in faith that God is holding - invisibly! - her and will not allow the fast approaching ground to crush the life from her.
The other problem is one of epistemology. Who is the Church? How do we know. Is anyone's actions, such as Baptism or compassionate alms giving, anyone's behaviour, such as an audible confession of Christ as Lord any guarantee of God's work in a life, given the propensity of the human heart to say one thing and either mean something completely other or nothing at all!
Of course, we know by faith the Church to exist. We believe it and we trust that ourselves and others are demonstrating the fruits of the Spirit. But it is always the case that all of us are only a day away from apostasy, in the sense that, as mentioned above, repentance must characterise an entire life.
So, I think I agree with you that an analogy of the Church is useful, but I'm anxious that we establish what we mean by the Church ... the Church is that which has been brought into life by this Word and is currently supported in every last breath of her existence by this Word.
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