Preached Canberra Baptist Church 13th of January 2008
Galatians 1.1-24
Yesterday in this church a wedding was celebrated by Baptist minister, a Lutheran pastor, and a Catholic priest working together. This event was so newsworthy that a photographer from the Canberra Times came along to record it for the readers of that august magazine! When it comes to our attitudes to other Christian that there are still many questions about how we work together, how we understand and relate to each other.
The letter to the Galatians is unique amongst the letters of the New Testament in that it departs from the usual form of an opening salutation, a blessing, and a thanksgiving for the life and faith of the recipients. If you read every other letter in the New Testament you will find these opening pleasantries designed to be an encouragement to those who receive the letter.
But when you read the letter of Paul to the Galatians what you find is a very different mood. Paul opens by declaring his apostolic authority, something that arrives from not human commission or human authority but directly from Jesus Christ and from God himself. There is an opening grace, and just when we you would expect him to say some lovely things about the Galatians and their faith we read these words:
I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel - not that there is another gospel but there are some who are confusing you and want to pervert to the Gospel of Christ. (Galatians 1.6-7)
So opens one of the most strongly worded of all Paul's letters. The question we want to engage today is the question of whether there is another gospel. Are there different streams and traditions in faith? Is it possible that people can believe different things? Or is there only one right way of believing?
Something of the ambiguity of these questions can be seen in the very wording in of Paul's rebuke. He suggests in verse six that there is such a thing as another gospel and that in embracing it the people whom he is writing have forsaken the true gospel.
And yet no sooner has he suggested this idea than he immediately recants and declares that there is no other gospel- there is only one true at authentic way of believing.
If these issues were difficult for Paul they are extremely topical and important for us also. I want to put forward three dimensions of this contemporary issue as a background to our consideration of the book of Galatians and what Paul is saying.
We live in an age of denominationalism. What this means is that there are many variants of Christianity. There are Catholics and Uniting Church people, Baptists, Anglicans, Presbyterians, and many other different ways of holding Christian faith. At a clergy gathering in central Melbourne in the early 90s we welcomed a new Catholic priest to our ecumenical fellowship. As we went around the table and introduced ourselves and our denomination it came my turn and I looked up and identified myself as the Rev Jim Barr of the Collins Street Baptist Church. The priest who had recently arrived in Australia from the Middle East looked at me with wonderment as I mentioned in my denomination and said with astonishment in his voice “Are there Baptists?”
Denominational identity was once fairly fixed. However the National Church life survey now tells us that over 40% of all worshippers in Protestant churches have switched nominations over recent years. Denomination now becomes a matter of consumer choice. Between denominations we tend to be nice and pleasant to one another, to recognize our shared kinship in Jesus. We acknowledge that we are all Christians together even as we also confess our separation.
And yet there are questions as to whether we are all equal and what exactly our ecumenical cooperation means. In July 2007 Pope Benedict XVI indicated that those who were not Catholics were not really part of the church of Jesus. “Christ ‘established here on earth’ only one church,” the document said. The other communities “cannot be called ‘churches’ in the proper sense” because they do not have apostolic succession — the ability to trace their bishops back to Christ’s original apostles. He referred to them as ecclesial communities drawing a fine distinction between those of the true faith and those fellow travellers who invoke the name of Christ but in some way fall short of full discipleship. The Pope is just being honest – there are elements of faith we see very differently. How should we hold together ecumenical openness and yet take seriously the things that we see as being of the essence of faith? Are the differences simply irrelevant details? Do they just reflect historical legacies that are no longer significant? Or are they important differences upon which we do have to reflect and for which at times we do have to stand? Is there another gospel, and is it alright to follow it? Or is there only one true path?
In the second instance let us consider the matter of other religions. Here the questions become even more acute. Is one free to follow “another gospel”? Islam prohibits any form of conversion to change of faith. In some Islamic countries apostasy is a capital offence. There is no freedom to choose another ‘gospel’ in these countries because there is only one ‘gospel’ which may be confessed. While Islam in the past has been highly tolerant of those of other faiths, it is intolerant of those who have been Moslems but make alternative choices about belief.
Before we are too condemnatory of Islam let us remember that it was only a little over three hundred years ago that Thomas Aikenhead, a 19 year old student from Edinburgh was executed in Britain for Blasphemy. While drinking with friends at the pub he was heard to say “that divinity or the doctrine of theologie was a rapsidie of faigned and ill-invented nonsense, patched up partly of the morall doctrine of philosophers, and pairtly of poeticall fictions and extravagant chimeras”. For the worthy divines of the Church of Scotland there was no room for ‘another gospel’.
The third instance is the matter of the development or growth of faith. Is Christian theology itself something that is evolving and developing? Until the nineteenth century many Catholic theologians would have said no: the content of faith has been revealed in the first few centuries complete and unchanging.
Baptists have always believed differently
We limit not the truth of God
to our poor reach of mind,
By notions of our day and sect,
crude partial and confined … (George Rawson: Hymn 107 in the Hymn book)
And even more personally, is it possible for individuals to change their minds about what they believe? Do we mature, grow and experience different nuances of faith? In my pastoral work I often come across members of the congregation who say that they do not believe exactly as they used to believe. Is it possible to grow and develop in one's faith? Can people hold different emphases in their grasp of faith, or hold the same doctrine in different ways? Is one wrong and one right? Is there ‘another gospel’ or is it all the same?
This question in various guises impacts us: our relations with other Christian denominations, our attitudes to those of other faiths, attitudes to one another within the community of the church in our own holding of the mystery of faith. Baptists have traditionally had a strong doctrine of the freedom of conscience, have been committed to the toleration of religious difference and a creative grasp of the interaction of individual and social freedoms within the community of the church. Over the next three weeks will examine these ideas in more detail.
But let us examine the issue of difference that Paul was dealing with in Galatians and the solution he proposed. Jesus of course was a Jew and grew up practising the Jewish faith of his day, grounded and laws and regulations and practices of the Old Testament. Although Jesus did visit some Gentile territory the earliest Christian communities were found within Judaism linked to the Temple in Jerusalem and synagogues in local communities. Paul was the theological genius who encouraged Christianity to break away from the cultural frameworks of Judaism. You can read the story of how this was finally negotiated in Acts chapter 15. Under Paul’s evangelistic Ministry the Christian communities he founded move beyond the narrow confines of Jewish religious practice to a much simpler form of religious life focused around love and commitment to Jesus as Lord.
We read in various places in the new Testament of some tensions between the Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians. In Galatians we see one of the strongest points of conflict. The Galatian church had been founded by Paul in the freer tradition of Gentile Christianity but some teachers were trying to move it back toward Jewish Christian practice including full observance of Old Testament law and the Jewish ritual apparatus, including circumcision. You can see various attractions in the course they were suggesting: there was a rich human cultural tradition involved. The rituals practices and the holy days of Jewish religious life would give substance and colour to the otherwise simple worship life of the Gentile church.
Against this Paul was vigorously opposed. You can read his theological arguments in chapters two, three and four of this book. As a reversion to Jewish Christianity is no longer a social issue we have to deal with I won't be engaging with those chapters in great depth. I am more focused on Paul's logic and the basic principles he puts down for how will we make our decisions about faithfulness to God and how we deal with those who make other decisions.
I mentioned earlier that one of the charges of the Pope makes against other Christian traditions is that we do not have the continuity of apostolic succession - that is, an unbroken human tradition of transmission of doctrine and authority for ministry reaching back to New Testament times. The lack of a human tradition is seen as a fatal flaw in our understanding of faith.
Yet Paul in Galatians grounds his understanding of the true faith specifically in rejection of all human authorities! He opens the letter:
Paul an apostle - sent neither by human commission nor from human authorities but through Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised him from the dead … (Galatians 1.1)
He goes on later in the chapter to assert:
For I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin; for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received a through a revelation of Jesus Christ. (Galatians 1.11-12)
Paul’s argument is grounded on a foundation of direct revelation from God and repudiation of human authority and tradition.
In the complex matter of ‘other gospels’, of how we manage difference and change, we stand with Paul in the belief that Jesus is alive, that God is a present and direct influence in life. Few of us may have Paul’s dramatic testimony of meeting Jesus on the Damascus Road, but we start with the assumption that (to quote the formula we have heard over the Christmas season) that ‘God is with us’, that what we are doing is not just a matter of received human traditions, or churchly pronouncements by popes or preachers, or of free choice by floating consumers who say “I like this flavor, this doctrine, this colour of religion”. Faith for us is neither matter of history - of what we received from our parents or nation – nor is it a free decision about what happens to suit us in life. Faith is a response to the living God – an active, calling, welcoming presence in life. Of course history will affect how we see God, and our personal wills to any assent of faith, but the critical thing is an experience of God, of Jesus as the embodiment of God’s love and the Lord of every single life.
The great paradox of ‘another gospel’, and all those great questions that faith today evokes, is that each of us need to know ‘my gospel’ first. Each one of us needs to know where we stand, who Jesus is for us, what Jesus has given to us by way of good news. For Paul it was a message that turned the world upside down – but Jesus doesn’t call everyone to that vocation! But Jesus calls every person somehow, and it is that kernel of experience and faith-response which is where we start with all these great issues of truth and difference, respect or conflict.