23 Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed. 24 Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith. 25 But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, 26 for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. 27 As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. 28 There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. 29 And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.
Galatians 3:23-29 is part of the doctrinal section of this letter, extending from 3:1-4:31. Here, Paul argues for liberation from the Law and replacing it with faith. He will argue that Christians are already the seed of Abraham through faith. Faith reconciles what the Law and other social barriers divide.
For Christians today, this letter speaks powerfully to some basic Christian truths. In Chapters 3 and 4, Paul will remind them of their powerful experiences of the Holy Spirit. He will write that the Law had its place in the plan of God for the people of God, namely, Israel. The Law was part of the growing and emerging plan of salvation of the world. However, the plan had to change because it was time to include Gentiles in a way that was not possible before. He offers the biblical argument that Abraham was right with God through his faith, long before the Law of Moses, and therefore he becomes the father of all who believe, including Gentiles. In fact, the Law intentionally separated the people of God from their neighbors. What Paul sees so clearly is that faith reconciles people. Paul agonizes over them to see that Christ be formed in them. With God, everything is a matter of timing. God does not give us a world where your life is ready-made and at hand. Rather, you learn and grow. The same is true with the people of God, which needed the law at one stage, but what God really wanted was a reconciled humanity. His opponents refer to being right with God through the Law. Paul has more concern that we are right with God through adoption into the family of God. We have learned that the universe has a history. It continues to grow. The earth has a history. Every culture has a history. You and I have a history. Paul is saying that salvation has a history that one time involved the discipline of the Law. With Christ, that time is done. The Law no longer identifies and characterizes the people of God. Rather, the people of God have a new identity because they are now with Christ and clothed with Christ.
Paul's passionate letter to the churches of Galatia opens a window on the controversy that surrounded the expansion of Christianity into Gentile communities throughout the Mediterranean world. It touches on such fundamental questions as: Were Christian churches to be seen as branches on the Jewish tree, or new and distinctive organisms? Were Gentile converts obligated to accept Jewish practices and values? Were new Christians free to maintain some of their former ways of life? By the time Paul wrote the letter to the Galatians, the controversy over such questions was raging intensely.
As we have been seeing, in the Galatian Christian community, evidently some could be persuaded by some missionaries who claimed authority from Jerusalem that the primarily Gentile Galatians must follow the Jewish Law if they wished to be truly Christian. What is more, as is apparent from Paul's response, these Law-advocates focused on both the Abrahamic covenant and the later Mosaic Law. If there was anyone well acquainted with the promises extended to Israel through both these paths, it was the elite-educated, erstwhile-zealous Pharisee, Paul. Heightened by his obvious emotional attachment to the Galatian Christians, Paul's argument against these opponents is both theologically brilliant and emotionally barbed.
23 Now before faith came, by which Paul could mean both the subjective opening to faith and the objective teaching of “the faith, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed. Paul continues to describe what the true nature and function of the Law has been for humanity. Instead of being the gateway to justification before God, the Law was a watchful jailer, keeping people from any further transgressions (3:19). At times, the Law may have seemed more like a benevolent guardian, but it was still keeping men and women imprisoned. The Law served this necessary but inferior purpose until the "time of faith" arrived.
24 Therefore the law was our disciplinarian (παιδαγωγὸς). Today, one usually connects pedagogue with the teaching or schoolmasterly instruction of children - suggesting that if this were the Law's function, it was perhaps gently educative in its mission. In Paul's day, however, a pedagogue was a specific individual. In Roman and Greek families, the pedagogue was a slave whose entire job was to supervise carefully young children, in and out of the home. The pedagogue was not primarily a teacher but was an "enforcer," making sure strict rules of discipline and correct behavior were practiced. Paul paints this rather militant, unyielding portrait of the Law as our "pedagogue." The Law was our pedagogue until Christ came. Paul clarifies that "time" as "until Christ came." Still, the Law's role did serve to ready humans for the time of Christ, so that we might be justified by faith. With the coming of Christ, the time for being right with God through faith would finally be at hand.
25 But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian. The pedagogue is now relieved of its duties. The Law is no longer in charge. Actually, the transformation that occurs during this time is twofold. First, faith in Christ replaces the guardianship of the Law. Second, the fulfillment of the Abrahamic promise now goes into effect. According to Paul's previous argument, the heir to the Abrahamic covenant/promise could only be Jesus Christ (Galatians 3:8). Now that this Christ has come, all the Galatians, all the Gentiles, become true "children of God" through their faith in Christ.
In verses 23-25, then, we have a historically conditioned argument in that the time of the Law ended with the coming of the message of eschatological salvation. The gospel could not have initiated a new epoch in salvation history if in content God had not established its validity independent of the Law. The relationship to the Law is not constitutive for the concept of the gospel. If we miss this point, he says, we fail to see the distinctiveness of the New Testament gospel message of the saving presence of the divine rule.[1] He makes it clear that the coming of Christ is the end of the epoch of Mosaic Law. The Law is not the definitive form of the righteous will of God. The Law is a provisional entity related to a world that is perishing. All forms of Law, while provisional, have a role in the world before the arrival of the end. In fact, New Testament ethical reflection primarily focuses on what is beyond the external imposition of Law by unfolding the implications of the fellowship of believers with Christ, which can then take us beyond the “third use” of the Law that the Reformers discussed.[2]
26 For in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. The life of the risen Christ and the energizing power of the Spirit vitalize the body of Christ. Personal faith in Christ incorporates us into this body, even as baptism seals it. The history of theology involves endless debates concerning the relationship between life in Christ and justification. We will do well to keep them separate in our thinking.[3]
27 As many of you as were baptized into Christ, suggesting that the key that opens the prison door of the Law for all believers is their baptism "into Christ." Paul will make a more full statement in Romans 6:3-11. The context here seems to suggest Paul has more in mind than simply baptism in Christ's name. "Into Christ" implies a state of fellowship or union together with Christ of all believers. The saying is decisive when we think of baptism as in relation to the unity of Christians with Christ. Yet, we must not turn it into a new law, as if baptism replaces circumcision as the “rite” through which one must pass.[4] Such baptism into Christ means you have clothed yourselves with Christ. The metaphor itself intends to suggest more than a mere exterior layer, but to "take on the character of" or "to become as" Christ himself. Thus baptized into Christ, we become one with Christ, and thus, unite ourselves in a bond of fellowship stronger than any other existing force. In baptism, we clothe ourselves with Christ, and not with a “new person.” This image brings into focus the intense connection between Christ and those who follow Him.[5] Putting on Christ is a way for Paul to write of the spiritual transformation that occurs as believers participate in Christ.[6]
28 There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. Reconciliation occurs as the Spirit takes humanity up into fellowship with the Father of the Son. The Spirit assures that this reconciliation is no longer coming solely from the outside. We ourselves enter into it.[7]Paul now expresses one of the things that excite him about baptismal unity. In particular, of course, breaking down the wall between Jew and Gentile was precious to Paul. Yet, for the Jew, this cleavage was the most radical within the human race. One might also note that the cleavage between owner and slave was significant as well. Yet, from what we can tell, some early bishops were slaves. In terms of Christian communities, in a practical way, he did not want anything to disrupt the present fellowship of the community. Paul applied the principle to women as well, in Philippians 4:3 and I Corinthians 11:10. Augustine also referred to this passage when he said God made male and female alike in the image of God.[8]Luther says that one might extend the list indefinitely: There is neither preacher nor hearer, neither teacher nor scholar, neither master nor servant, and so on. For him, in the matter of salvation, rank, learning, righteousness, influence count for nothing. There is evidence that one of the legal requirements Paul's opponents were advocating among Gentile Christians was the rite of circumcision. This rite obviously symbolized the difference between Jew and Gentile - that held groups apart. Now Paul triumphantly holds up baptism into Christ as the act that breaks down all barriers and blurs all distinctions. Paul declares that there is no difference between Jew and Gentile (Greek). He also insists that even the other major categories of distinction no longer hold - there is no "slave or free" nor even any "male or female." Dissolving these differences also suggests that in Christ there is no hierarchy - morally (Jew/Gentile), economically (free/slave) or socially (male/female). All distinctions are removed, religious caste, social rank, sex. "One heart beats in all, one mind guides all, one life is lived by all."
29 And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise. The true heirs of the promise and children of Abraham are those who are partakers of the promise in faith in Christ. Paul uses Abraham to show the struggle for the inheritance of Abraham as between the gospel of the raising of the crucified Christ and the Torah is concerned the power of the promise. If the true heirs of Abraham, the father of the promise, are those in whom the promise gives proof of itself in the Christ event in the power of the God who justifies people and creates life out of death, then that is the end of the precedence of the Jew over the Gentile in the history of salvation. What was promised to Israel is now valid for all believers.[9] The promise becomes inclusive.it becomes universal.[10] Paul's argument concludes by returning to the theme of 3:7, 9, 14 and 16 - the identity of the true descendants of Abraham. The argument turns on the identity of the Christian fellowship with Christ. Physical descendants are no longer important, but those who believe in Christ and belong to him. There is no longer any doubt about who can lay claim to the promised Abrahamic inheritance - it is all those who "belong to Christ." Christ fulfills the promise of righteousness that God granted to Abraham and his offspring. All those in Christ may lay claim to God's promised gift.
Once again, the Law provides no proper means for rightness with God. Rather, adoption as children of God, becoming part of the children of Abraham through faith, is the key to rightness with God. 3:26-29 has the rhetorical purpose of reminding the Galatians of their baptism as proof that they became children of God by faith. He uses an argument based upon experience. Their baptism, an experience they cannot deny, already makes them children of God and the seed of Abraham.[11] Theologically, baptism and faith belong together. Baptism establishes fellowship with the crucified and risen Lord. The righteousness of faith culminates in the event of baptism because baptism mediates participation in the filial relation of Jesus Christ to the Father. Baptism shows that people have received the missionary proclamation of the church by faith. In a sense that Augustine and Aquinas recognized clearly, baptism is the sacrament of faith. Baptism is the basis of the adoption of believers as children of God and the word of righteousness of faith relates to baptism. Baptism relativizes all human distinctions, not as an act in itself, but because of the fellowship with Christ that it symbolizes.[12]
[1] Pannenberg (Systematic Theology, Vol. II, 460).
[2] Pannenberg (Systematic Theology, Vol III, 61, 95).
[3] F. F. Bruce
[4] Barth (Church Dogmatics IV.4, 115-16).
[5] Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV.4, (p. 14).
[6] F. F. Bruce
[7] Pannenberg, (Systematic Theology, Vol II, 450).
[8] (De Gen. ad litt. 3.22).
[9] Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 146-7.
[10] Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 146.
[11] Tolmie
[12] Pannenberg (Systematic Theology, Vol III, 257, 235, 390).
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