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realcoolhand -> RE: Paul vs God (5/30/2010 8:13:05 AM)
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Maybe instead of hiding each other we should all just chill. This should be a fun and informative thread if we can all remain calm.
By the way, Rule, the letter to the Galatians was not written to Abrahamic Jews, it was written to Greek converts living in Galatia in central asia minor, which is why the letter was written in Greek. Supergeniuses notice shit like that.
Back to Tazzy's post, I'll go out on a limb and say that the author of the text she cites is wrong, and wrong because he misses the context of "I say," the phrase on which he focuses. That phrase does not set Paul in opposition to God, but rather to those "judaizers" Paul identified in Galatians 1:6 as "some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ" by insisting on obedience to every detail of levitical law.
Those legalists apparently taught that salvation was the consequence of obeying the law, and therefore as a consequence of human effort. t's already been stated in this thread, but Paul's ultimate point, in Galatians and his other letters, is that we are not saved by our own efforts, but through Christ's grace realized in his sacrifice. As Paul put it in Galatians 2:21, "if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose." Paul is having none of that.
As Paul explains in Galations three, the law is not at the heart of the Abrahamic covenant, since it was not given until nearly half a millennium after that covenant was formed. Rather, the law was given to control our sinful nature until the promise of the original covenant would be fulfilled in Christ, and during that interim we were "imprisoned" by the "yoke" of the law as our "guardian." But as Paul mentions in Galations and expounds upon in his letter to the Romans, the law brings death by highlighting, and thereby actuating, the sinful nature it also restrains. "I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, 'You shall not covet.'" Romans 7:7. Therefore where "I was once alive apart from the law, . . . when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died. The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity and through the commandment, deceived me, and through it killed me."
And the fact that it is PAUL saying this IS relevant, because he was unequaled in his zealous observance of the law. As he stated when on trial for preaching the Christian religion, "My manner of life from my youth, spent from the beginning among my own nation and in Jerusalem, is known by all the Jews. They have known for a long time, if they are willing to testify, that according to the strictest party of our religion I have lived as a Pharisee." Acts 26:4-5. His point, in explaining that "I say" all that he says, is that I, better than you, would know whether it is law or grace through faith that brings salvation, and I say that it is grace through faith.
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