Mennonite World Review

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• Paul said instead of circumcising the flesh, instead, circumcise your heart.

  - Tom Tobin (jan 18 at 3:14 p.m.)

• A couple of comments on the Sunday School lesson regarding Galatians 2:15-21:

  The question is posed, “To eat kosher on non-kosher – is that the question? Prior to that, we have the statements that “Male circumcision and kosher food laws are signs of the covenant made with Abraham and Moses. For full membership among the people of God and God’s Messiah, Gentiles must also observe these practices.” That sounds like the ideas that followed E.P. Sander’s idea of covenantal nomism. I think that Paul’s opponents were teaching more than the idea that believers needed to keep the main covenantal badges of Judaism; that these Judaizers were teaching that Christians needed to obey the whole Mosaic Law in order to be justified, declared or made right, before God. In the following observations, I refer to “Galatians,” by Moisés Silva in “Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament,” edited by Beale and Carson (Baker Academic, 2007, pp. 785-812). “[T]he meaning of another genitival phrase, erga nomou (‘works of law’), is also disputed, but for different reasons. Does Paul have in view God’s commands in general or only those (ceremonial) regulations—circumcision, dietary laws, calendrical observations—that served as ‘national badges; marking the Jewish people as separate from others? Since Paul first uses the phrase against the background of Peter’s withdrawing himself form meal-fellowship with Gentiles, it is quite possible that the ceremonial elements of the law are in the forefront. It would be a mistake, however, to suggest that such elements are exclusively in view. As the apostle develops his arguments (esp. in 3:15-25), it is patently clear that he speaks about the law as a whole. (For example, the initial statement that we cannot be justified by works of law is paralleled by the comment that the law is not able to give life [3:21], but the latter passage can hardly be restricted to dietary regulations.)” (p. 790). I would add that when Paul writes Galatians 5:3, “Again I declare to everyman who lets himself be circumcised that he is obligated to obey the whole law,” (NIV), the reference to the whole law is to more than circumcision, calendrical laws, and dietary laws. Then, regarding the construction, pistis Christou ‘faith of Christ’, the Sunday School lesson tells us that “the grammar precludes using ‘in Christ’. Some comments by Silva seem in order: “[P]rior to the 1970s the construction pistis Iēsou Christou was almost universally understood to mean ‘faith in Jesus Christ’ (the so-called objective genitive), but in recent decades many scholars have argued that it should be rendered ‘the faith/faithfulness of Jesus Christ’ (subjective genitive). Elsewhere ... I have attempted to show that the arguments usually advanced against the traditional interpretation are either irrelevant (e.g., some scholars point to the absence of pistis + objective genitive of a person in classical literature, but their absence is precisely what one would expect in documents that do not otherwise speak about the need of believing in a person) or based on an inadequate understanding of the objective genitive (e.g,, that it is not natural, or that it does not apply to this case because pisteuō is construed with the dative or with a prepositional phrase). The ambiguity henerent in genitival constructions can be resolved only be examining unambiguous constructions in the immediate and broader contexts, preferably if they use the same or cognate terms. The NT as a whole, and Paul in particular, regularly and indisputably use both pistis and pisteuō of the individual’s faith in God or Christ, but they never make unambiguous statements such as episteusen Iēsous (‘Jesus believed’) or pistos estin Iēsous (‘Jesus is believing/faithful’). These and other considerations explain why the early fathers who spoke Greek as their mother tongue never seem to have entertained the idea that this genitival construction has Jesus Christ as the subject of the implied action” (pp. 789-90). We are justified before God by believing in Jesus Christ, by trusting in his atoning sacrifice on the cross to forgive us for our sins. We obey, not as a means to gain salvation, but because we have been justified and transformed by the Holy Spirit.

  - Daniel Hoopert (jan 19 at 8:00 p.m.)

Comment on the article Paul makes his case

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