Bruce Longenecker’s The Theology of the Letter to the Galatians is part of Cambridge’s New Testament Theology series. In keeping with the scope and scale of the series, the focus of this study is sustained engagement with the theology of Galatians rather than extended analysis of occasion and historical context or summary and evaluation of scholarly discussions.
The book unfolds in three parts: ‘Reading the Theology of Galatians’, ‘Probing the Theology of Galatians’ and ‘Positioning the Theology of Galatians’. Part I introduces the study (ch. 1), offers an overview of the epistle’s theological patterns (ch. 2) and concludes with a reading of ‘the discursive flow of Galatians’ that amounts to a forty-page commentary (ch. 3). Part II selects and studies aspects of Paul’s theology as they emerge and are expressed in Galatians: ‘the problem’ (ch. 4), the Torah (ch. 5), themes of participation (ch. 6), the relationship between being in Christ to other forms of identities (ch. 7), what Longenecker calls Paul’s ‘centering of “Christ-full-ness”’ (ch. 8) and divine righteousness, with an emphasis on God’s faithfulness to the ethnic people of Israel (ch. 9). Part III relates Galatians to other portions of the New Testament, both within and beyond the Pauline corpus (ch. 10), samples significant moments in the history of reading Galatians (ch. 11) and asks after the resonance and urgency of Galatians for today (ch. 12). The study concludes with a brief appendix that considers whether Galatians accomplished its purpose (probably, suggests Longenecker), followed by a section with further readings.
Part I and Part III, respectively, orient and open horizons for students of Galatians. It is in Part II, however, that Longenecker’s interpretative proposals are most evident. Both ‘the problem’ and Torah are considered in a ‘layered perspective’ (pp. 67, 85). Paul’s diagnosis unveils both ‘the power of Sin’ and ‘the stoicheia used by Sin’ (p. 83). For Paul, the ‘present evil age’ (Gal. 1:4) is characterised by ‘the propensity for self-centered living’ and ‘forms of self-preferentiality’ that play themselves out in a competitive relationality that Longenecker describes as a kind of ‘social Darwinism’ (p. 72). ‘Beyond’ this ‘cancer of unbridled self-interest’, Paul identifies both sin, which he ‘externalizes as a power’, and the ‘stoicheia of the world’ (pp. 74, 76–77). On Longenecker’s suggestive reading, the stoicheia are ‘identity influencers conscripted by the power of Sin’ (pp. 77–78): the ‘phenomena that shape the identities of people’ and thus establish differences that the ‘the cosmic power of Sin’ twists into the conflictual relational chaos of us and them (p. 81).
This ‘layered’ reading also shapes the interpretation of the place and purpose of Torah. One layer is the ‘purpose pertaining to the ethnic people of Israel’ (p. 85). Here, Torah is a mediated, time-limited revelation and relationship that protects the people of Israel from idolatry. Considered in relation to its ‘cosmic purpose’, however, Torah ‘unmasks Sin’ by naming and unveiling the pervasive but otherwise ‘undiagnosed’ power: because ‘all people’ – both Jew and gentile – ‘stand under the curse articulated by the Torah’, all are identified as under the ‘power of sin’ (pp. 98–99). Against this ‘backdrop’ (p. 98), Longenecker reads ‘God’s triumph over the power of Sin’ in participatory terms (p. 100). Dying and rising with the crucified and resurrected Son who ‘gave himself for us’ (Gal. 1:4), those ‘in Christ’ are ‘liberated from the realm of the overlordship of Sin and relocated…in the realm of divine grace’ (p. 103). For believers to die and live is, on Longenecker’s interpretation, for them to ‘lose their identity as people who live in the world in which Sin is the overlord’ (p. 106) and to participate in the ‘power-vortex’ that is the ‘death and resurrection of Christ’, in which ‘identities are dissembled and reassembled’ (p. 107).
Identity language frames the following chapters as Longenecker navigates perennial debates about, for instance, human solidarity, ethnic difference, the continuing place of the law in relation to Israel and the nations, and patterns of freedom and love that Paul hopes will characterise the community of those in Christ. ‘In a world dominated by…Sin’, inherited and acquired identities are ‘raised to the level of “macro-identities”’ in a ‘competitive and combative world’ characterised by ‘oppositional forms of relationality’ (pp. 114–15). While observance of the Torah remains a legitimate ‘micro-identity’ in Christ, to require it of gentiles would be to make it a ‘macro-identity’ and thus deny the good news according to which ‘the only legitimate macro-identity is trust in Jesus Christ’ (pp. 124–25). For Paul, ‘Christ-groups’ are comprised of people with numerous micro-identities (p. 124), particular histories and inheritances that ‘were held in the hands of God through the death of the “I”’ (p. 108). There is, however, a fundamental solidarity, centred on the shared and singular macro-identity of belonging to and being in Christ and characterised by an other-oriented relationality that is the freedom of mutually dependent love.
The student who first studies Galatians with this book may not always be aware that Longenecker is offering a reading that navigates scholarly debate, one that learns from but is not located within any one ‘school’ of interpretation. There is an occasionally dismissive dealing with hinted-at traditions of reading (e.g., themes of guilt and forgiveness on pp. 101 and 103). But the tone is constructive rather than polemical, and the textual and theological focus is finally among the book’s strengths. This study is what the series hopes to be: a sustained presentation, both orienting for the student and stimulating for the scholar, of the theology of the letter to the Galatians.
