Lecture 23: Galatians Completed, the Prison Letters, and Meeting Ephesians

The lecture, section by section

1. Who were the agitators?

   The consistent verdict of the church's commentators identifies the Galatian agitators as Judaizers: men teaching that to belong to Messiah's community one must live as a Jew, beginning with circumcision, the seal of the Abrahamic covenant, and continuing with the law as contemporary Judaism practiced it. Longenecker proposes a second front, antinomians answered from 5:13, but Essex sees no second party: Paul is anticipating the human counterattack to his own teaching, that freedom from the law means freedom from all standards, and answers it himself: freedom is not opportunity for the flesh, for the believer walks by the Spirit and so fulfills the law of Christ, bearing fruit the Mosaic code demanded but could not produce. Schmithals's Gnostic-syncretist identification has drawn no evangelical following; the opponents are Judaizers, and Judaizers only.

2. Fallen from grace

   If you receive circumcision, Christ will benefit you nothing; you have been severed from Christ, you who are seeking to be justified by law; you have fallen from grace. Three readings: the Arminian, that saved people here lose salvation; the sanctification reading, that believers fall into legalism while their eternal state rests with God; and the reading Essex holds, the phenomenological. Paul genuinely believed the Galatians converted, you received the Spirit by the hearing of faith, yet their flirtation with another gospel perplexes him: I am perplexed about you. He still calls them my children and labors until Christ is formed in them, expecting they will heed the letter. But should they take circumcision, committing themselves to justification by law-keeping, the outward profession that once looked like conversion would be shown a sham: not salvation lost, but a profession proved empty. Their response to the letter will resolve the apostle's perplexity, one way or the other.

3. The warnings, and the pastor's discernment

   A student asks whether this is a general principle, and Essex affirms it: the New Testament letters are written to believers, every part of them, yet their writers know that among professors some possess only profession, and the warnings are real warnings; the one who heeds them confirms the reality of his faith, and the one who persists into apostasy or unrepentant sin shows what was never there. Hebrews, Second Peter, and Jude will run on the same rails. The pastoral posture follows: preach the whole counsel, warnings included, trusting the Spirit to use the warnings to keep those who are truly God's, as Jude opens and closes on the Father's keeping. Discernment is not judgment: church discipline says, your present behavior is that of an outsider, without pronouncing on the heart, which only God reads. And a clear statement of the gospel saves no one by itself; the famous advice columnists could summarize Christian belief accurately without embracing it, and so, Paul warns even preachers, could we.

4. With what large letters

   See with what large letters I am writing to you with my own hand. Two readings: MacArthur allows that Paul, too indignant to wait for a secretary, wrote the whole letter himself; the majority, with Essex, takes an epistolary aorist: at 6:11 Paul takes the pen for an unusually long closing in his own hand. Scribes were trained to write minutely; Paul's untrained hand wrote big and bold, and, as Second Thessalonians shows, the autograph closing was his standing mark of authenticity against forgeries. No conclusive proof exists either way; know the issue, lose no sleep.

5. The Israel of God

   Peace and mercy be upon those who walk by this rule, and upon the Israel of God. Everything turns on the little word and. The majority reading makes it explicative, even: those who walk by the rule are the Israel of God, and since they are Jew and Gentile in the new creation, the church is here called Israel, the one explicit prooftext of covenant theology's new Israel. Essex takes the simple connective: peace on all who embrace the rule that neither circumcision nor uncircumcision matters, and, with special emphasis against the Jewish false teachers, upon the Israel of God, the Jewish believers who embrace it, proof that Paul's fury at Judaizers is no fury at Jews. Bruce airs an eschatological-Israel reading; Longenecker's even-the-Judaizers reading convinces no one here. Two supporting facts: grammatically the connective is the more probable, and nowhere else in the New Testament are believers explicitly called Israel, a silence even advocates of the majority reading concede while cherishing this verse as their exception. Both camps, Essex admits, exegete the verse by their systems; he declines to let one ambiguous conjunction overturn the New Testament's consistent usage, and notes that in Galatians 3 Gentile believers are blessed with Abraham, the believer, who was himself saved as a Gentile, partaking of Israel's promised blessing in Christ without becoming Israel.

6. Preaching Galatians

   Galatians is theologically the prelude to Romans, and pastorally the place to begin. Rome was mature; the Galatian churches were young believers on the edge of retrogression, blown by winds of doctrine, and Essex's judgment is blunt: most American churches have a Galatian problem, not a Roman problem. If a congregation needs the gospel reaffirmed against confusion, preach Galatians long before Romans.

7. The prison letters, and their carriers

   Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon are bound as the prison letters: in each Paul names himself a prisoner. The human links bind them further. Tychicus, whom Essex crowns the most important mailman in the New Testament, carries Ephesians and Colossians, commissioned in both to fill in the news the letters omit; with him travels Onesimus, the runaway slave returning to Philemon, whose house hosts the Colossian church, so that Colossians and Philemon arrive together and are heard together, with Archippus a further link between them. Timothy stands in the salutation of all four. Luke sends greetings in Colossians and Philemon; only Timothy remains by Philippians, whose longer lists of companions are gone.

8. The Roman venue

   Where was the prison? Tychicus, an Asian converted on the third journey, points past the brief Jerusalem custody to Caesarea or Rome. Luke's presence fits both, for the we-sections carry him from Jerusalem's arrest to Rome, and church tradition places his gospel research, the interviews in Judea and Galilee, and surely with Mary, whose ponderings fill Luke 1 and 2, in the Caesarean years. But Philippians tips the scale: greetings from Caesar's household, his servants, and the gospel known throughout the praetorian guard, whose standing contingent lived where Caesar lived, in Rome. No verse says, I write from Rome, and salvation does not hinge on the point; but the ancient fathers were united, the internal evidence converges, and, as O'Brien asks, if not Rome, where? Every alternative is weak beside it. So: the house arrest of Acts 28 for Ephesians, Colossians, and Philemon, and, likely after transfer to stricter custody with the docket set, Philippians.

9. The order of the letters

   Ephesians, Colossians, and Philemon left together in Tychicus's mailbag, one of the greatest mail pouches in history. Philippians came later: its keyword is shortly, Timothy to be sent as soon as Paul sees how his case goes, Paul himself hoping to follow, the adjudication at last at hand, while in Philemon too he asks that the guest room be prepared. As for whether Ephesians or Colossians was dictated first, no one knows: the same head-and-body image underlies both, Ephesians dwelling on the body which is the church, Colossians on the head who is Christ; Essex commends the question as a conversation starter for the millennium.

10. Ephesians: author and destination

    Providence, Essex remarks, seems to have foreseen the liberal denial of Pauline authorship and answered it twice: Paul in the salutation, and, mid-letter, I, Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus for the sake of you Gentiles, an impersonation no devout first-century writer could have penned. The harder question is the audience: the earliest manuscripts lack, in Ephesus, though the preposition stands awaiting a place-name. The majority reads a circular letter, the blank filled by Tychicus church by church, Lincoln even identifying it with the Laodicean letter of Colossians 4. Essex sides with Hoehner and the tradition: no manuscript supplies any other name, and Ephesus, the province's mother church, best explains the text, the name falling out of some copies precisely as the letter circulated beyond Ephesus, as Colossians 4 expects letters to do. The one strong objection, that Paul, three years in Ephesus, writes, having heard of your faith, answers itself: he has heard of the faith that continues among them, and of their ongoing love for all the saints.

11. The church, the Gentiles, and the mystery

    Ephesians gives the church its widest New Testament horizon. God gave Christ as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all: not a local congregation but the one body of all saints, imaged as the one new man, God's household, a holy temple rising; and through the church, singular, God now displays his manifold wisdom to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. The letter addresses Gentiles as Gentiles: formerly separate from Christ, excluded from Israel's commonwealth, strangers to the covenants, without hope and without God, but now brought near by the blood of Christ, the dividing wall broken, Jew and Gentile made one new man, reconciled in one body through the cross. This is the mystery hidden in past ages and now revealed: that Gentiles are fellow heirs, fellow members of the body, fellow partakers of the promise, and to Paul above all was given the stewardship of declaring it to them.

12. Walk, love, and the Spirit

    We are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them, and walk becomes the letter's hinge word. Chapters 1 through 3 run in the indicative, what God has done; from 4:1 the imperatives answer: walk worthy of the calling, no longer as the Gentiles walk, walk in love, walk as children of light, walk as wise. Proportionally Paul speaks of love more in Ephesians than in any letter, God's love in the Beloved and the answering love of the saints, and of the Holy Spirit's ministry more than anywhere: sealed with the Spirit, the unity of the Spirit to be preserved, the Spirit not to be grieved, the filling of the Spirit, the sword of the Spirit. No named crisis occasions the letter; its purpose is that Gentile believers might grasp the glory of their position in Christ and walk in the privileges and conduct that answer to it.

1. The phenomenological principle says warnings are real, written to believers, and used by God to keep his own. How does that view let a preacher deliver hard warnings without either terrifying the genuine or comforting the false?

2. Essex will not build a doctrine on one ambiguous conjunction in Galatians 6:16, preferring the New Testament's consistent usage. What does that decision teach about the weight a single verse should bear in a theological system?

3. Ephesians names no crisis; its purpose is that Gentile believers grasp the glory of their position and walk accordingly. Why might a letter of pure reminder be exactly what a comfortable church needs most?