The theme of Galatians 4:4-7, part of a larger segment that began in verse 1 and concludes in verse 11, is that of slaves or children. For Tolmie, 4:1-7 has the rhetorical device of an analogy to guardianship in order to contrast spiritual slavery and sonship of God.
Galatians 4: 4-7 contain one of the most elegant expressions of incarnational faith in the New Testament.
I begin with a theological consideration of the text. Paul utilizes the metaphor of slavery and freeing a slave to express his notion that our relationship to God has radically changed. The distinction between slave and child is a relational one. Both are under the authority of the head of the household, but they have a different status. Through Jesus Christ, the legal relationship of slave to the master is no longer binding. Paul uses imagery for the messianic/eschatological era, the fullness of time (χρόνου), suggesting that one period has ended so that another can begin, such as the transition from childhood to adulthood, or the transition of the slave to freedom. They have a new status, and a new era begins. The Moment arrived for God to transition to a new era in the plan of reconciling and redeeming the world, and humanity, which had been a minor and had various tutors, transitions into a mature age. The mission of the Son is to bring this fullness of time and has become the Lord of time. The sending of the Son is the event that gives time its fullness by being the agent of redemption and adoption. All time becomes fulfilled time. As understood by science, space/time is moving toward a void, toward emptiness and nothingness, but as understood through the Son, space/time is moving toward fullness.[1] This event gives the Old Testament promises of the people of God expanding to embrace all nations, that God established a covenant with all peoples, that transformations of Torah need to occur for those promises to find their fulfillment. The promises and hopes of the Old Testament are without content apart from the coming rule of God in Jesus. Apart from their relation to this event, the law and the prophets are defective because of unresolved tensions that the event of Jesus of Nazareth resolves. In an analogous way, time is defective as it hastens toward the time of Jesus and moves away from this time, but this event of Jesus gives time its fullness, for time has its purpose because of this event.[2] Regarding human experience, most of us assume that our time has meaning, but our moments of boredom, the despair of lost love, of lost passion for life and vocation, can lead to an experience of lost time. The present becomes futile without its connection to a positive future. Our time is meant for us to enjoy and live fully, embracing the brief time we have. Theologically, the sending of the Son is the origin of the doctrine of the Trinity, having its counterpart in the sending of the Spirit, for such sending implies pre-existence.[3] This sending involves the cooperating will of Father, Son, and Spirit, expressing the love of God toward the cosmos and toward humanity. This sending involves God in a form of self-abasement and self-emptying. The Son came under the Law, stepping into the heart of the conflict between the faithfulness of God and the unfaithfulness of humanity. He took the conflict within divinity. Obviously, human sin offends by God, but God also threatens divinity with death. In this way, God enters solidarity with humanity.[4] Paul stresses that the Son was born of a woman, bringing the sending of the Son into an intimate connection with his birth, which in the context of the canon, is striking, as Paul expresses no interest in how Mary conceived and gave birth to Jesus. In fact, his point is that the birth of Jesus was natural. We to think of Jeremiah 1:4, where the Lord set the prophet apart in the womb of his mother. In an analogous way, God set apart Jesus from his birth to fulfill his mission as the Son. The point is that the Son has entered the sphere of earthly existence with its conditions and relations. This applies to his entire earthly course that we find mention not only of his birth but also of the subjection of his earthly course to the Mosaic Law.[5] Law had worked out its educational purpose and God now superseded it with the sending of the Son. Negatively, it was the purpose of the Law to deepen the conviction of sin and thus to show the inability of all existing systems to bring people near to God. Positively, it assumes a moral and spiritual expansion. This was the path God chose to rescue those under the law, giving the gift of adoption as children. They are free from slavery, but even more, have brought into the family of God, giving the children the Spirit of the Son that allows the intimacy of relating God as Abba (daddy), Father, even as Jesus taught in the Lord’s Prayer. The freedom and the adoption into the family of God is expressed in prayer. They receive in their own subjectivity before God a filial relation that expresses itself as spontaneity in relation to the Father and hence also to all creaturely reality. Putting Aramaic and Greek forms together symbolized Jewish and Gentile unity. These verses remind the believer of the basics of faith in which they stand and offer the good news that anyone who calls God "Abba" is part of the family. The abolition of the Law and rescue from bondage was a prior condition of the universal fellowship of God family. The presence of the Spirit is thus a witness to being children of God. the gift of the Spirit is the result of adoption as children. The mission of the Son is to give the rights of being in the family of God and the mission of the Spirit is to give the power of using them.[6]H. Schlier (1971) said that God bestows on us not only the status of children through the sending of the Son, but also the character and knowledge of children through the sending of the Spirit. God bestows on us the character and knowledge of children because we are already in the status of children. This passage shows that reconciliation occurs as God takes up humanity into fellowship with the Father of the Son, a taking up that occurs through the Spirit, who assures that this reconciliation is no longer coming solely from the outside. We ourselves enter it. We find the goal of the sending of the Son is in others. As Paul sees it, a special link exists occurs with the death of Jesus by which God liberates believers from the dominion of sin, Law, and death. Therefore, the sending of the Son aims at the reconciliation to God of the world. The claim of Christian proclamation that this took place in the history of Jesus needs fuller exposition and demonstration, however, if it is to hold good. Note the connection between the sending of the Son and the function of the Messiah relative to the fellowship and renewal of the people of God. This passage shows that fellowship with God brings distance from self, enabling the people of God to fulfill their individual callings in service to God and to the world, to which God addresses divine love. Paul is describing the freedom of a new immediacy to God that believers have as children, mediated by the sending of the Son. The Spirit brings the mission of the Son to its completion. Where this freedom of the Spirit is, our reconciliation to God has reached its goal. The Old Testament could call all the people children of God. The new thing for Paul is the inclusion of non-Jews in this filial relation and the linking of the relation to the gift of the Spirit and to fellowship with Jesus Christ, the Son, through whom believers receive the Spirit of adoption as children. For Paul, then, only in Jesus Christ has the basic filial relationship for which we are destined come to full and definitive manifestation. This passage was among the keys for the Reformation to emphasize the immediacy of relationship to God.[7] Freedom and immediacy to God have an intimate connection.[8]
I now share some exegetical and homiletical considerations.
Paul shifts the metaphor to deepen his crucial point that our relationship to God has radically changed. Now he uses the metaphor of slavery and freeing a slave. Through Jesus Christ, the legal relationship of slave to the master is no longer binding.
4 But when the fullness of time (χρόνου) had come, referring to the messianic or eschatological era that completes the long wait of centuries. One might translate it more precisely, as “when the time had reached its full term.” "Fullness" has much more meaning than an end of a period. "Fullness" suggests that one period has ended so that another can begin. It can denote the legal transition from childhood to adulthood. Furthermore, as slaves fulfill the time of their service, they become free. They take on a new status as a new era begins. First, it was the fullness of time in relation to the giver. The moment had arrived in God's plan. Second, it was the fullness of time about the recipient. Humanity had to reach a mature age. A time existed when humanity was in the position of a minor. Humanity had tutors and governors, the stoicheia. Humanity was a slave among other slaves. However, the fullness of time suggests that God sent the Son to humanity. With the Son came the fullness of time, that is, the mission of the Son is to bring the fullness of time. The Son has become Lord of time, a free person. This event gives time its fullness. This fulfilled time is before or after all other time. It makes all time chronologically understood also fulfilled time. Time may appear to move toward a void, but it is moving toward this fullness. All time is fulfilled time.[9] The entire notion of the fullness of time pictures time as an empty vessel, not yet filled, but waiting for a particular time to fill it. “Fullness” suggests something filling a vessel, plan, concept, or form full. The Old Testament promises are without content apart from the coming of the reign of God in the man, Jesus, and therefore defective in themselves, yet, being related to this event, they are not for nothing. Time has a similar character. It has the defect and advantage of being a time hastening toward the time of Jesus and is then destined to move away from His time. There is no fulfillment of time without the time of fulfillment. Of course, behind all of these meanings lies the rich and evocative theological truth that with the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the old age is over and a new age has begun. God has brought all things together in Christ and through Christ. The specific word kairos does not occur here. However, the decisive significance of the concept expressed by kairos receives its definition by the opening of the verse. The new age brought in by Jesus is not a refutation of the old age. The old age had fulfilled its time, its purpose. All time from the moment of creation was moving toward this new time of redemption and release. A new age has begun. The Law holds sway no longer. The season of grace has come! Christ has inaugurated a new regime.[10]
When is the time ever right? Joy, complete, unrestrained, uninhibited, unconstrained joy is hard for us. The world is full of reservations. Claims of fulfillment must come up against hard realities. Yet, Paul invites us to consider the possibility.
Chronological time keeps pressing forward. Some of us make the best of it. We come to the end of a year, take time for reflection upon the past year, and look forward to the New Year.
The New Year means a fresh start, a second wind, another chance, a kind of reprieve, a divine act of grace bestowed. If we have made serious blunders, they are made. All our tears cannot unmake them. We may learn from them and carry our hard-won lessons into the New Year. We can remember them, not with pain, but with gratitude that in our new wisdom we can live into the present year with deeper understanding and greater humanity.[11]
We presume that human experience has meaning. Of course, those who despair presume it does not. Despair involves being without a future because you experience the present as futile. The fact that we get up in the morning and live our lives presumes some sort of meaning, good or bad. It at least presumes we seek such meaning for our lives. Life becomes an incredible search for something you do not know exists. You presume it does. Therefore, hope is at the center of the search. As much as certain writers and artists want to convince us that life is meaningless, and worse, that we are ignorant fools for presuming meaningfulness, their lives testify to the presumption of meaning.[12]
Time troubles us as human beings. Our concern for time can lead us down a negative path. Time exercises a form of tyranny over us. Time drags as we go from our time to get up, to take a shower, to get to school or work, to go to the dentist, and various daily tasks. Consequently, time is something we just get through, usually in an idle and boring way. The other path is a positive path of enjoying time and using it to its fullest. The greatest achievements of humanity arise out of this path for embracing time. Time filled with accomplishment, meaning, and purpose may be something like what Paul means by the fullness of time.
Hold fast the time! Guard it watch over it,
every hour, every minute! Unregarded it slips
away, like a lizard, smooth, slippery, faithless,
a pixy wife.
Hold every moment sacred.
Give each clarity and meaning,
each the weight of thine awareness,
each its true and due fulfillment.
‑‑Thomas Mann
God sent his Son. God sent Jesus when the time was right to serve as the agent of redemption and adoption. Theologically, this notion of the sending of the Son is the New Testament origin of the notion of the Trinity, and it has its counterpart in the sending of the Spirit that we find in the Gospel of John. "Sent" includes concept of pre-existence. The significance of this passage is that Christology begins with the primitive Christian interpretation of the person and work of Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ. Messiah implies the thought of divine sonship. It early had the sense that in the man Jesus the preexistent Son of God came to earth. Only God could be behind this event, namely, the sending of the Son into the world. Yet, we can know that it happened only as it took place on the plane of our human, creaturely reality. This sending involves the totality of his life, including his birth.[13] This sending has its ground in the free will of the Father and the Son in fulfillment of the divine love toward the cosmos and the world of humanity. God exposed divinity to an imposition. Speaking in an all too human way, God has been hard on Himself. God is stern toward Himself in this self-abasement and self-emptying. The Son came under the Law, stepping into the heart of the conflict between the faithfulness of God and the unfaithfulness of humanity. He took the conflict within divinity. Obviously, human sin offends by God, but God also threatens divinity with death. In this way, God enters solidarity with humanity.[14] The Son was born of a woman, the phrase evoking the fullness of body as well as the completion of the time of a woman's pregnancy. These verses show categorically that for Paul the issue of how Mary conceived and gave birth to Jesus was not as important as the fact that Jesus was born to save. Furthermore, the stress is not on the supernatural birth of Jesus but the very natural process of being born of a woman. Jesus is not some celestial god (familiar to the Greeks) who is above the Law; he is fully human who is born under the Law, a Jew. Jesus came not to provide a new moral law or philosophy; he came with a specific function of freeing slaves and spreading the boundary of family to include Gentiles. Yet, as F. F. Bruce stresses, the sending of the Son coincides with his birth from a woman. We are to think of Jeremiah, the servant of the Lord, and Paul as he describes himself in this letter. Only here do we find in Paul an express relating of the sending to the birth of Jesus, and even here the reference is not simply to the beginning of his course. The point is that the Son has entered the sphere of earthly existence with its conditions and relations. This applies to his entire earthly course that we find mention not only of his birth but also of the subjection of his earthly course to the Mosaic Law.[15]
The Son was born under the law, the primary reference is to the Mosaic Law, though Gentiles also have undergone elementary discipline. Law had worked out its educational purpose and God now superseded it with the sending of the Son. Negatively, it was the purpose of the Law to deepen the conviction of sin and thus to show the inability of all existing systems to bring people near to God. Positively, it assumes a moral and spiritual expansion.
As one born under the Law, the Son was born 5 in order to redeem (ἐξαγοράσῃ, rescue from loss) those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption (υἱοθεσίαν) as children. Paul then adds another concept, that of adoption. Not only has God set the believer free from slavery, God has adopted the one manumitted into the family of God. 6 And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, "Abba! Father!" As God redeems and adopts the believer, he or she can call God, the Almighty, the Creator of Heaven and Earth, "Abba, Father." "Abba" is an Aramaic word best translated "Daddy." "Abba" originated among Jews in Palestine. It relates Jesus referring to God in this way, and possibly to the Lord’s Prayer. The point is the freedom such adopted children can have in prayer. It suggests the power of response to divine love in prayer issuing forth in freedom related to adopted children. They receive in their own subjectivity before God a filial relation that expresses itself as spontaneity in relation to the Father and hence also to all creaturely reality. Putting Aramaic and Greek forms together symbolized Jewish and Gentile unity. Jesus used this word about God. The word became significant to later generations of those followed Jesus. Through the grace of Jesus Christ, believers are heirs of the riches of the Kingdom of God. These verses remind the believer of the basics of faith in which they stand and offer the good news that anyone who calls God "Abba" is part of the family. The abolition of the Law and rescue from bondage was a prior condition of the universal fellowship of God family. Though Mosaic Law is uppermost in his mind, Paul extends it to all systems. The negative aspect of redemption is freedom from slavery. The positive is adoption as children. However, it is not just an inheritance, but new life, in which Paul associates the Trinity. The presence of the Spirit is thus a witness to being children of God. We should note that here, the gift of the Spirit is the result of adoption as children. The mission of the Son is to give the rights of being in the family of God and the mission of the Spirit is to give the power of using them.[16] H. Schlier (1971) said that God bestows on us not only the status of children through the sending of the Son, but also the character and knowledge of children through the sending of the Spirit. God bestows on us the character and knowledge of children because we are already in the status of children. Betz warns against trying to settle such questions of construction and interpretation by the importation of dogmatic and philosophical categories. One should not assimilate statements in Galatians to later Pauline statements on the same subject if one cannot do it without violating the natural sense of the language in Galatians. Their reconciliation with God was complete without the Law.
This passage shows that reconciliation occurs as God takes up humanity into fellowship with the Father of the Son, a taking up that occurs through the Spirit, who assures that this reconciliation is no longer coming solely from the outside. We ourselves enter it. We find the goal of the sending of the Son is in others. As Paul sees it, a special link exists occurs with the death of Jesus by which God liberates believers from the dominion of sin, Law, and death. Therefore, the sending of the Son aims at the reconciliation to God of the world. The claim of Christian proclamation that this took place in the history of Jesus needs fuller exposition and demonstration, however, if it is to hold good. Note the connection between the sending of the Son and the function of the Messiah relative to the fellowship and renewal of the people of God. This passage shows that fellowship with God brings distance from self, enabling the people of God to fulfill their individual callings in service to God and to the world, to which God addresses divine love. Paul is describing the freedom of a new immediacy to God that believers have as children, mediated by the sending of the Son. The Spirit brings the mission of the Son to its completion. Where this freedom of the Spirit is, our reconciliation to God has reached its goal. The Old Testament could call all the people children of God. The new thing for Paul is the inclusion of non-Jews in this filial relation and the linking of the relation to the gift of the Spirit and to fellowship with Jesus Christ, the Son, through whom believers receive the Spirit of adoption as children. For Paul, then, only in Jesus Christ has the basic filial relationship for which we are destined come to full and definitive manifestation. This passage was among the keys for the Reformation to emphasize the immediacy of relationship to God.[17] Freedom and immediacy to God have an intimate connection.[18]
7 So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God. Now that Christ has come, everything is different. In Roman adoption procedure, natural and adopted children inherited equally, while in the Jewish system they did not inherit unless there were no others.
The distinction between slave and child is a relational one. Both are under the authority of the head of the household, but they have a different status. Our work does not lead to faith. Moral character is not the goal of faith. Rather, righteous living, the life that pleases God, is a means to an end. Our changed lives are the means. The worship of God and advancing the earthly divine mission are the end.[19] Rules have much to say about our actions, but rarely do they shape our attitudes, thoughts, and emotions. A relationship is a far more influential force on the whole of how we live. When work of Christ replaces our work, slaves become children, and relationship guides us instead of rules. A clear result happens as we internalize the heart of God into our own.
[1] Barth (Church Dogmatics, III.2 [47.1] 358-9).
[2] Barth, Church Dogmatics III.2 [47.1] (p. 461-2)
[3] Pannenberg (Systematic Theology, Vol II, 277, 316).
[4] Barth (Church Dogmatics, II.1 [30.2], 397).
[5] Pannenberg (Systematic Theology Vol II, 302).
[6] H. B. Swete (The Holy Spirit in the New Testament, 1909, p. 204).
[7] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology III, 128.
[8] Pannenberg (Systematic Theology, Vol II, 316, 321, 436, 450).
[9] Barth (Church Dogmatics, III.2 [47.1] 358-9).
[10] Barth, Church Dogmatics III.2 [47.1] (p. 461-2)
[11] --Howard Thurman.
[12] Inspired by an interview with Walter Wangerin (W. Dale Brown, Of Fiction and Faith: Twelve American Writers Talk About Their Vision and Work [Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1997].)
[13] Pannenberg (Systematic Theology, Vol II, 277, 316).
[14] Barth (Church Dogmatics, II.1 [30.2], 397).
[15] Pannenberg (Systematic Theology Vol II, 302).
[16] H. B. Swete (The Holy Spirit in the New Testament, 1909, p. 204).
[17] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology III, 128.
[18] Pannenberg (Systematic Theology, Vol II, 316, 321, 436, 450).
[19] N. T. Wright, After You Believe.
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