Galatians and Christian Theology

This collection of essays on Galatians is drawn from a conference held in St Andrews University in 2012, which brought together not only New Testament scholars, but also leading systematic theologians in an attempt to bridge the gap between biblical studies and Christian theology. It’s certainly a volume which makes one think it would have been good to be there, to listen to the debates and to pick up more of the undercurrents and growth points in the debates which the papers encouraged.

Galatians has, it hardly needs saying, had a profound influence on Christian theology. Its importance for Luther and the Reformation is well reflected in this volume with chapters by Mark Elliott, Thomas Söding, Timothy Wengert, Scott Hafemann, Javier Garcia, and Simeon Zahl; and these contributions are complemented by Karla Pollmann and Mark Elliott’s chapter on studies of the reception of Galatians in the Latin West of the fourth and fifth centuries and Oliver O’Donovan’s discussion of Augustine. What is interesting about these studies is that they pay relatively little attention to the criticisms of Luther (and Augustine) by Krister Stendahl, which portrayed him as distorting Paul’s theology into a form of tortured introspection. Indeed, Zahl’s piece presents a very different view of the Augustine–Luther trajectory of ‘affective Augustinianism’. He sees it as providing a compelling reading of Gal 5:16–25, asserting that ‘[o]ur emotions and affections both are what ultimately serve to determine our actual behaviour and are what God himself is most concerned with’ (338). Other contributors highlight developments in scholarship which emphasise Luther’s focus on the believer’s union with, participation in Christ, something which in some Finnish theology has come close to linking Luther’s thought with Eastern notions of theosis. In this way, they bring Luther closer to E. P. Sanders’ account of Paul’s theology as a form of ‘participatory eschatology’, while ignoring Sanders’ savage criticism of later Lutheran scholars who portrayed Judaism as a religion of ‘self-redemption’.

So far, one might say that the reception historical contributions have largely ignored contemporary ethical and theological criticisms of earlier readings of Galatians, preferring to argue for particular readings of, in particular the Augustinian–Lutheran tradition. Perhaps the exception to this is Mark Elliott’s piece, which explores a fuller trajectory within the Lutheran tradition, showing the tensions between those who saw salvation in terms of a forensic imputation of righteousness and those who stressed the affective, participatory side of Luther’s writing. Elliott intriguingly draws attention to the debates between Osiander on the one hand and Melanchthon and Calvin on the other, and in the same vein, between Heshusius and Wigand a decade later. Here forensic understandings of justification triumphed in the Formula of Concord (1580) ‘due,’ so Elliott, ‘to suspicion toward any notion of the indwelling of Christ’s essential righteousness (as in Osiander’s heresy) and a preference for spiritual and moral struggle on the disciple’s way to Christ. Faith is not a given; it has to be struggled for.’ Nevertheless, the tradition argued for by Osiander and Heshusius lived on in Pietism with its understanding of justification as rebirth, ‘the restoration of the original image of God’ (Spener) (147–8). All this makes for a helpful, if somewhat patchy, introduction to some of the current debates in New Testament studies, which are clearly coloured by prior theological positions. How could it be otherwise?

So what are the key points of debate in this volume? In a sense there is a convergence between debates within New Testament studies and those between theologians. Within New Testament studies, J. L. Martyn’s work remains greatly influential. For him, Paul’s letter is an apocalyptic work, unfolding what is contained in the opening verses, esp. 1:4: ‘who gave himself for our sins that he might rescue us out of this present evil age’. It presents Christ’s incarnation, crucifixion (above all) and resurrection as an event in and through which God invades the world, overcomes the evil powers which hold men and women in bondage and frees them to participate in the new creation. Others, notable among them N. T. Wright, see the coming of Christ as part of an extended history of salvation which embraces creation and fall, the call of Abraham, the covenant with Israel, the exodus and the giving of the Law and, following on the crucifixion and resurrection, the age of the Church. Israel was, on this view, intended to deal with the problem of sin, which was consequent on the fall but its failure to be faithful meant that God then sent the Messiah, Jesus, to put the world to rights by liberating people from their sins and incorporating them into the Church, the New Israel. If Martyn’s account of God’s dealing with God’s world is marked by a deep dichotomy between the fallen creation and the new creation inaugurated/brought about by the crucifixion, Wright’s is an extended drama in a number of acts, which tells the story as one where God’s plan for his world is repeatedly thwarted, but where God is able to respond sovereignly to each challenge.

Within these two approaches to Galatians, a number of other debates run across the different approaches. Is Paul’s theology of salvation one which is couched in principally juridical, forensic terms, such that sinners are declared (as opposed to actually becoming) righteous? Or is the new life in Christ achieved through participation in his life, through his indwelling in the believer? And: what is it for Paul to say that we are justified ek pistews Christou? Is it through our faith in Christ; or is it through the faith of Christ which effects a new faith within those whom he calls?

What is interesting in this volume is to observe how, within theologians’ reading of Galatians, there has been a steady shift towards some of the readings by New Testament scholars just listed. Thus, as noticed above, Luther studies have paid much more attention to Luther’s presentation of justification as an imparted righteousness which the believer acquires through union with Christ than to his use of the language of imputation, and have stressed Luther’s focus on ‘participation in Christ’. There is, it has to be said, no difficulty in finding support in Luther’s own writings for both these accounts of his theology. Anyone who cares to work her way through Luther’s Galatians Commentary will quickly see how Luther moves from one view to the other, reflecting in a measure the shifts in Paul’s own rhetoric. There is plenty of ambiguity in Luther as well as in Paul.

But theologians are also critical of some readings of Paul (and of Luther) for more strictly theological reasons, pointing to the theological implications of some of the positions attributed to Paul by New Testament scholars. Bruce McCormack takes issue with Martyn’s account of the overcoming of the evil powers through Christ’s crucifixion. Specifically, Martyn argues that it is Christ’s faithful death on the cross which overcomes the powers of evil. These powers are understood specifically not as ‘fallen angels’ but ‘as Sin (reified into a power that holds the human race in thrall) and the Law (insofar as it is made to be the tool of sin)’ (165). But, McCormack objects, how could the faithful death of one man achieve such ends? Martyn lacks any theological ontology which could explain either 1) how the death of one man could have universal significance; or, 2) how it works in relation to the anti-God powers of Sin and the Law. Without such an underpinning in theological ontology, claims McCormack, Martyn’s account of Paul’s theology ends up by offering no more than ‘a rich battery of images and concepts’ which while being ‘rhetorically powerful, do[es] not rise to the level of an adequate explanation.’ (167) This puts the finger quite precisely on one of the major difficulties in attempting to offer any kind of biblical theology, any systematic account of, e.g., Paul’s theology. The problem is that, as McCormack acknowledges, Paul ‘does not set forth such a theological ontology’. This leaves the New Testament scholar with a dilemma. Should he or she attempt to uncover Paul’s implicit theological ontology or even, if such is not to be found, to supplement his concepts and images with one of her own making? This, it might be thought, is a worrying prospect for any one who sees the Bible as the ultimate and sole canon of theological truth. If it needs the skills of theological departments to supplement it before it can be brought to bear on doctrinal and moral issues under dispute in the church, where does that leave us? Requiring some kind of regula fidei in order to read the Bible theologically and canonically? Furthermore, if we concede that Paul lacks a theological ontology, then are we not in fact asserting that what we have in Paul’s letters is anything but a carefully worked out theological explanation but rather a set of rich religious discourses and ad hoc argumentations which are contextually limited and indeed, often ambiguous and, as the history of their reception more than adequately demonstrates, patient of many readings? The last thing one should expect of such texts, indeed, is that careful historical study would bring us to a singular reading of them. The more we understand about their possible nuances of meaning, the more we see how many interpretations are open to us. The formulation of church teaching at any given time will indeed take its inspiration from this rich source of theological discourse but will still need to be shaped by contemporary experience and debate within the church.

We shall return to the question of singularity but first to notice another sharp criticism of exegetical reconstructions/interpretations of Galatians, this time from Edwin van Driel of Fordham University. What van Driel argues is that while both Wright and Martyn tell Paul’s story of Jesus Christ in very different ways they both also make Christ’s coming contingent upon events within human history which have served to frustrate God’s plans. In the case of Wright, God’s plans in creation were frustrated by Adam and Eve’s sin and this led to the covenant with Abraham and the call of Israel to bring restoration to God’s world. When Israel failed to serve God’s purposes, God sent his Son, the Messiah, to save the day: ‘Since Israel had failed in its calling to become a blessing to all the nations, “what is needed… is a faithful Israelite through whom the single plan can proceed after all.”’ (231, quoting Wright’s Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision, 105). True to a tradition running back to Duns Scotus (though much neglected of late) van Driel sees such discourse as productive of an infralapsarian Christology, namely one which, rather than seeing the incarnation as something which is integral to God’s purposes in creating the world, is a kind of afterthought, a plan B (or indeed plan C, if the covenant is plan B) which robs it of its glory and makes it contingent on Adam’s sin: O felix culpa!

Similar points can be made about Martyn’s apocalyptic account of God’s dealings with the world. Martyn’s story certainly contrasts two eras: the era after the demonic invasion of creation, which ushers in the ‘present evil age’, and the era of the new creation effected by God through Christ’s crucifixion, but it still presents the latter as a response to the former. Van Driel’s solution to these theological dilemmas is to point to the supralapsarian christology of Colossians and Ephesians, where Christ is the first-born of all creation (Col 1:15) in whom all things find their meaning and fulfilment. Whether or not this is by Paul, says van Driel, ‘when we do our own theological work it is [this] model that recommends itself for expansion.’ Effectively, van Driel is conceding that however one reads Galatians, whether apocalyptically or salvation historically, it will be christologically and soteriologically problematic; for better results, one had better turn elsewhere in the New Testament. It is not a complete rejection of the Bible’s canonical authority, more a search for a ‘canon within the canon’.

To return, however, to the question of whether it is possible to agree on a single, coherent reading of Paul’s theology in Galatians. What is striking about the contributions here is a remarkable lack of willingness on the part of nearly all contributors to recognise what an extraordinarily rich source of different—and indeed sometimes conflicting—theologies Galatians has been; and indeed how difficult it is to give a unified account of Paul’s thought in Galatians which does justice to all its aspects. One contributor certainly does address such issues directly. In her chapter, ‘The Singularity of the Gospel Revisited’, Beverly Gaventa acknowledges that interpreters have rarely done justice to the sharp shifts in language between that of justification and of participation in Gal. 2:16–21. Given that Paul insists strongly that there is only one gospel (1:7), do not interpreters have a duty to provide a singular interpretation of these verses, showing how Paul relates the two different types of discourse to each other?

Gaventa’s response depends on distinguishing two senses of ‘singularity’: one a strictly numerical one: there is only one form of the gospel, that which Paul has preached to the Galatians and which asserts that salvation/rectification comes only through ‘Christ’s faith-creating faithful death and only through that single event.’ This is suggested at least by Paul in 2:15–16 and directed against those who teach that rectification is through a ‘combination of law observance and Christ’s faith-creating faithful death’ (189). All this remains within the language of sin and justification/rectification, which is picked up again in v. 21. But what of vv. 19–20, which speak not of law and sin but of life and death: ¹

I died to the law that I might live to God/ I have been crucified with Christ/ It is no longer I who live but Christ lives in me./ The life I now live in the flesh I live in faith?

Gaventa’s answer is to focus attention particularly on the language of crucifixion in these verses. What is it for Paul to say: ‘I have been crucified with Christ.’ The language—and thought—here is violent and strange (cf. 6:14, 17). It finds some contemporary parallels in the Hellenistic ‘practice of death’ where death is ‘a way of living… in which the self is transformed’ (David Aune, quoted 193), but, as Aune observes, the violence of Paul’s language here transgresses the philosophical commonplace. This is more than a schooling in living with the reality of one’s mortality; it refers for Gaventa to the violent death of the ‘I’, the whole person, ‘not just the nomistic self only’. This could be said of anyone, not just those who had previously been living under the law. ‘The canvas on which Paul depicts the gospel has enlarged from legal language to existential language.’ Here a second sense of singularity is required. The ‘gospel’s singularity comes to expression in a form that is frightening: the gospel gives life by taking it away’ (194). ‘[T]he gospel is singular in that it is all-consuming: there is no more ego. And the gospel is also life-giving: “Christ lives in me.” The living “I” now lives in the realm of pistis, which comes from and is given by the Son of God. Paul is a paradigm, then, not only of the gospel of Jesus Christ and not of the law but also of the gospel that brings death and life, the gospel that gives life in a new place.’ (195)

It is clear that Gaventa here is fully in the Martyn camp, arguing that the changes which are brought in by Jesus’s death on the cross are so radical that the former age is being swept away, and all is being renewed in a new creation. So radical indeed is this transformation that it embraces all that went before, the way of life under the law as much as that of those who lived outside the law. This ‘totalizing’ reading of the nature of the changes which Christ’s ‘faith-creating faithful death’ inaugurates takes its lead from the language of Gal. 1:4, ‘who has rescued me out of this present age’ and as such aligns itself with Paul’s most radical interpreters: Luther with his personalisation of the powers of Sin and the Law (something shared by Martyn) and Wrede, the initiator of apocalyptic readings of Paul. It certainly provides us with a remarkably integrated account of the whole of the passage 2:16–21, which tightly knits together the language of justification/rectification and of life and death and union with Christ and does full justice to Paul’s language of the end of the Law in Galatians. For me, such a reading brings the radicality of Paul’s thought in this letter into sharp focus.

Needless to say, it brings with it its own, above all theological, problems. From the earliest days, orthodox interpreters of Galatians have struggled to put a clear distance between themselves and dualist interpretations of the letter. Gal. 1:4 with its language of ‘this present evil age’ and dark powers which hold men and women in bondage provided support for Marcion (the earliest Pauline theologian?) and for the Manichaeans with whom Augustine, himself formerly a ‘hearer’, engaged in fierce debate (see the remarkable contra Fortunatum). If the whole of existence before the coming of Christ is to be destroyed—‘crucified’–if that ‘old’ world is portrayed as being under the sway of dark powers, what does this say about God’s sovereignty, his rule over that world? It certainly makes it very hard to see how such a view could be accommodated in Wright’s salvation-historical account of God’s giving of the Law, however much those who have been entrusted with it under the covenant may be held responsible for its failure. At the same time, one would also have to say that views like Wright’s receive considerable support from other passages in the Pauline correspondence, not least from Romans 9–11. May one not have to accept that singular readings of Paul can only embrace so much of Paul, for the very simple reason that Paul, as the long history of his reception shows, is conflicted within himself, pulled between a cosmological and a forensic eschatology, a tension which, as Martin de Boer has argued, is a deeply rooted feature of first-century Jewish thought? May we not have to accept that in order to do justice to the mystery of the human predicament we may need both kinds of language/thought: that of human disobedience and of bondage to dark powers; and, further, that it is this inability of human language and concepts to do justice the nature of the human predicament and of God’s dealing with it which means that it is inevitable that theology will always will be dialectical?

And what of current discussions of Pauline ethics? The volume contains a number of valuable contributions. Interestingly, there is less diversity of opinion here. O’Donovan, Rabens, Aletti and Zahl all write from within an identifiably Augustinian tradition; O’Donovan leaves us greatly in his debt for his careful account of Augustine’s own developing understanding of Gal. 5:17. And while there is no clear reference in these contributions to Fredriksen’s and Stendahl’s criticisms of Augustine’s introspective readings of Paul, there is a clear shift away from a stress on the dividedness of the Christian self (even the believer’s paralysis and bondage to the flesh) to seeing Paul’s language here as setting out the co-ordinates for Christian ethics: ‘treating them not as originating motives but as horizons of deliberation’ in such a way that ‘the agent is set one step back from the alternative, and so given space to consider and make a decision.’ As O’Donovan sees clearly, this is to bring Augustine much closer to John Chrysostom, who treats flesh ‘as a kind of reasoning, which is earthly, superficial, and inconsiderate’ (278).

There are a cluster of issues which receive thoughtful consideration. The relationship of human willing and desiring is set within a rich tradition from Augustine to Cranmer by Simeon Zahl. Both he and Volker Rabens have much that is valuable to say about the relationship between divine and human agency. In what sense does the Spirit’s action simply transform human willing and desiring? How could such a claim be squared with the ‘continued role of the flesh and of sin in the church and in Christian lives’ (344)? Rejecting a view, strongly reminiscent of O’Donovan’s (though here attributed to Gordon Fee), whereby Spirit and flesh are viewed not as forces but as two ‘different ways of life’ or ‘perspectives’ between which Christian agents are free to choose, Zahl explores instead a ‘dramatic’ understanding of the relationship between believer and Spirit. Taking his lead from Cranmer’s prayers in the Book of Common Prayer, Zahl considers how in them ‘we see the fundamental themes of Galatians 5:16–25: the centrality of desires, affections, and hearts, and the necessity of their transformation; God’s Spirit appealed to as the sole agent capable of performing such a transformation; and ethical behaviour, above all love for others, characterized affectively, and as fruit of the activity of the Spirit. The prayers also take for granted that Christians, too, to some degree, continue to have “unruly wills and affections” and “hartes” that need to be “cleansed,” though rather than dwelling on this, the prayers hope and ask for that situation to change.’ Thus in significant ways ‘the prayer matches the complexity of Paul’s account of agency… and it does so by turning the problem of divine agency into a petitionary act.’ (350–1) Believers participate in the divine act of transformation precisely through this act of turning to God.

What is intriguing in the ethical contributions so far reviewed is that they seem largely untouched by the apocalyptic readings of Paul which feature so largely in the earlier discussions of Paul’s gospel as such. The readings offered by those who follow the lead given by J. L. Martyn emphasise the dramatic impact of the event of Christ’s crucifixion both on believers and on the whole course of the world’s history.

Few, if any, of those writing in this volume would wish to play down the impact of the Christ event but there seems a world of difference between the measured view of the formation of human judgement, fostered by the traditions which flow from Galatians through Augustine, set forth by O’Donovan and the claims that believers no longer live except as Christ lives in them. O’Donovan is fully alert to Paul’s emphasis on the transformation of the believer, but his focus is on the choice which the believer has make between two perspectives rather than on being crucified with Christ and on the destruction of the human ego. For O’Donovan, the story of Christians’ ethical transformation is not limited to a consideration of Christian conversion. It projects this story ‘across the field of moral life, for “walking by the Spirit” is an enduring commitment to moral consistency through time, not a mere repetition of the pathos of a conversion moment’ (O’Donovan, 284). The language of flesh and Spirit provides a way of framing ethical questions, which gives due place to the continuing struggle that believers experience in their attempts to find such consistency and to live faithful to their calling.

And this emphasis on individual transformation in the search for human freedom and dignity in the life of the Christian sits uneasily with the emphasis, perhaps most characteristic of those who have been influenced by J. L. Martyn, on the radical break which Jesus’s death occasions between the old world and the new. In what sense is this a new humanity which arises out of the cross and resurrection? And in what sense is this new humanity integrally involved in the bringing into being of the new creation which stems from those events?

This is an appropriate point at which to introduce discussion of one further contribution to the ethical discussions in this volume, that of John Barclay. Whereas others focus principally on Gal. 5:16–25, Barclay, choses to concentrate on Gal. 6:1–6, arguing ‘that this set of maxims is designed to protect the community from the destructive influence of their contest-culture, since the flourishing of a community free from the usual competition for honour is integral to the meaning of the good news’ (307). But Barclay’s contribution is not merely an attempt to shed fresh light on Paul’s ethics by concentrating on an otherwise neglected passage of the letter, it is to be read as integral to his understanding of the letter as a whole. The social practice which Paul advocates is, for him, ‘the necessary expression of the Christ-gift’. Indeed, ‘non-competitive communities, ordered by a new calibration of worth, articulate and, in a certain sense, define the character of the Christ-event as an unconditioned gift’ (307). In this sense there is a dialectical relationship between theology and ethics in Paul. Paul’s ethics, his emphasis on a social practice which corresponds to the grace which the community has received, flows from his theology; at the same time, such practical expressions of the Christ-gift themselves illuminate, ‘define’, the nature of that gift. The meaning of the cross and resurrection, their quality as unconditioned gift ‘is discovered only in its social embodiment, in social experience and practice’ (317).

In Galatians, Paul announces the Christ-gift ‘as that dangerous and unsettling phenomenon, the unconditional gift.’ God, that is, gives not according to a ‘system of justice which upholds the cosmos’ but, rather, indiscriminately, ‘without regard to worth’. Paul had experienced this gift in his own call which was without regard for his status as a Jew; ‘sinful and idolatrous Gentiles were called without regard to ethnicity, moral behaviour or intellectual achievements’. Such a radically new understanding of God’s unconditional giving in Christ explains why ‘Paul can declare himself dead to the ultimate authority of the Torah (2:19)…. Crucified to the world, he follows a different kanwn, the allegiance to the Christ-event integral to the new-creation. This takes place in the formation of new communities that cross ethnic boundaries and discount regnant criteria of worth.’ It is thus ‘no accident’ that the first discussion of ‘justification by faith’ is focussed around the debate over table-fellowship with Gentiles at Antioch. ‘By compelling Gentiles to “judaize”, Peter makes the Christ-gift conditioned by something outside and before itself. In this critical location of social practice, he betrays the gospel, which stands or falls with its revolutionary status as an unconditioned gift. Unless communities radically recalibrate their systems of worth, they fail to enact the good news: a failure here would nullify the gift.’ (308–9)

Such an understanding of the Christ-gift provides Barclay with the key to the underlying logic of Gal. 5:13–6:10 with its list of ethical maxims in 6:1–6. On such a view, Paul’s overall ‘appeal for mutual love is no bland generality: it specifically targets habits of intracommunal rivalry that were characteristic of Mediterranean society. After setting a norm of mutual slavery in love (5:13), Paul issues a dire warning against its dysfunctional alternative: “If you bite and devour one another, watch out lest you be consumed by one another” (5:15)’. Paul’s standard Jewish list of ‘works of the flesh’ is ‘filled out with an extensive catalogue of socially destructive behaviour’ (5:20–21) matched by ‘an exhortation not to be vain, provoke one another, or envy one another’ (5:26). This, Barclay argues, is directed not simply against quite specific conflicts within the churches but against wider tendencies in society, focused on the pursuit or defence of honour and productive of conflict and disunity. The overarching rubric in Gal. 5:13: ‘Galatian freedom will not become an opportunity for “the flesh” inasmuch as they are “slaves to one another”’ is remarkable in that it ‘adjusts an inherently hierarchical relationship (slavery), not by canceling it, in the name of “equality”, but by making it reciprocal, a hierarchy that turns both ways’ (313).

This enables Barclay to read 6:1–16 as ‘a good example of this social policy’ (the continual inversion of hierarchy rather than its eradication) ‘in practice.’ 6:2, ‘Bear one another’s burdens’ follows the same pattern, with burden-bearing, the task of slaves, becoming a ‘task for all, in relation to all’. Again, a hierarchical relationship is inverted while being prevented from becoming oppressive by the continual exchange of service and honour.

There follows a rich discussion which cannot be summarised here. What, in the context of the wider discussions in this collection, stands out is two-fold. First is Barclay’s underscoring of the radically innovative character of Paul’s theology and ethics. Paul’s emphasis on the unconditionality of the Christ-gift means a radical break with previous understanding of divine standards of justice and worth as a new age is ushered in. This quite clearly sets him apart from those who prefer a more salvation-historical approach to Pauline theology. Second, closely related, is the emphasis on the inherently social nature of Paul’s theology: ‘the new creation presses towards the formation and flourishing of a community in which the truth of God’s self-giving in Christ is expressed in love, strongly resistant to the normal contest for honour. The relationship between “theology” and “social practice” is mutually constitutive: it is the Christ-event that gives meaning and shape to communal practice, while it is in social practice that the nature of the Christ-event is realized, or is not realized’ (317). This in turn sets Barclay apart from those who view Paul’s discussion of ethics in 5:16–25 as providing a general perspective and insight into the nature of human willing and decision making, rather than as part of a wider discussion of the specific character of Christian social ethics which in turn throws light on the meaning of Paul’s theology.

Much more that could be said about the rich contribution which this volume makes to the development of Pauline studies and to the opening up of central issues in theology. Recent focus on Paul’s language of new creation presents a golden opportunity to return to those readings of his theology which have seen it as innovative of a new social order, as portraying Christian faith as inherently social and political. Historically, readings of Paul’s theology, not least in Galatians, have been productive of major social, cultural and political change. It was to Galatians that the Fathers turned at the end of the fourth century as they began to lay the foundations for the new world which would emerge under the tutelage of the Empire. Aquinas saw Galatians as first and foremost a letter about innovation. It was the letter above all that inspired Luther to make the radical break with the world of the Mediaeval church.

None of that, however, has stopped the church and its interpreters from repeatedly individualising and interiorising Paul’s theology. Nor is it difficult to see how and why this has happened. Paul’s theology in his letter is intensely personal. The letter form, even when Paul, as in Romans, turns it into a kind of treatise, is itself personal. Paul’s theology is deeply rooted in his own experience. His gospel is one directed towards the transformation of believers’ hearts and minds. None of that of itself means that it is individualistic. People who wish to transform the nature of society and politics are as concerned with winning hearts and minds as are those who wish to bring individuals to repentance. But there are ambiguities which go further. The very term kaine ktisis is itself patient of different interpretations: does it mean new creature or new creation? When Paul writes ei tis en Christwi kaine ktisis, the singular tis might well suggest that ktisis here is to be translated as ‘creature’, referring primarily to the individual. But the clause which follows: ‘the old things have passed away, the new things have come into being’ pushes clearly in a different direction. What Paul is talking about is a fundamental change in the way things are. The same is clear in the concluding verses of Galatians where he writes that what is needed is neither circumcision nor uncircumcision but a new creation. Martyn’s lecture, delivered to SNTS in Goettingen in 1984, on ‘Apocalyptic Antinomies in Paul’s Letter to the Galatians’ was a turning point in Pauline scholarship where an awareness of the cosmic dimensions of Paul’s thought began to break into English speaking scholarship.

And, we need to bear in mind the remarks of McCormack, quoted above, that Paul’s writings (or is it Martyn’s account of them?) offer not a worked out explanation of the nature of salvation (whether understood as individual or corporate) but a ‘a rich battery of images and concepts’. Certainly, where the passage just referred to at the end of 2 Cor. 5 is concerned, such a description applies as well to Paul as to Martyn’s interpretation of his thought. But this is not to say that Paul gives no theological direction or guidance to those who come after him. The pointers are undeniably there: for Paul, those who come into the orbit of Jesus Christ are being drawn into a reality which will transform the very fabric of things, of the created world, will draw them out of a world which is in the grip of evil forces. Moreover, as new creatures, they will have their part to play in this process of transformation: as Paul puts it in Romans, they are instruments of the new order of justice which has been inaugurated through Christ’s death and resurrection. How this will be, what it means for the life of the individual and of the Church is something which will occupy Christians theologians, sometimes more, sometimes less, for centuries to come. And in that theological endeavour, the continued dialogue of biblical scholars around the meaning of ‘new creation’ in Paul will play its part, sometimes more, sometimes less.

In a sense there is an agreement on the centrality of the social and political aspects of Pauline thought between the salvation historical account of Paul which N. T. Wright offers and the more radically apocalyptic (one might almost say dualistic) account offered by Martyn. For both, what happens in Christ marks a turning point in the history of the world, which transforms human society and which involves those who encounter it in that transformation. What differentiates the two is in part the level of detail they are prepared to offer about the nature of this process and change on the basis of Paul’s writings. Does Wright try to tell us too much? His account of the drama of salvation is always seeking to press Paul’s thought into a grand narrative of world history with its different acts. Martyn’s account, while no less grand in its overall conception, leaves much more unsaid, remains more within the limits of Paul’s thought, respecting its elusiveness, reflecting (at least to a degree) its ambiguities and gaps. In this way, he invites theologians into a dialogue with the Pauline texts, into a common attempt to make sense of the reality into which they have been drawn, an undertaking which, despite its nearly two thousand year long history, is far from complete. But there is a further difference: Martyn’s apocalyptic vision of the world is darker than Wright’s grand narrative of salvation which assures us all the while of God’s overall control. Martyn draws out those elements in Paul which do not shy away from the radicalness of evil in the world, elements which appealed to Marcionites and Manichaeans, and without which, indeed, we may find it difficult to offer anything like a realistic account of our present world, even if at times they seem to threaten the very sovereignty of God. Yet at the same time, this more fractured vision, with its sharp portrayal of the world’s tribulations and evils, precisely because it is willing to confront them, offers a deeper, stronger hope, one more able to speak to people in the increasingly troubled world. Perhaps this is what accounts for its continuing attraction to those who seek hope from this strange and sometimes violent letter.