Thoughts on Gal 1:4

I’m about to start writing an article on Salvation-History, Apocalypticism, and Galatians. The natural place to begin with of course is Gal 1.4-5: “He gave himself for our sins, so he could deliver us from this present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father.  To God be the glory forever and always! Amen” (CEB).

Here’s my thought:

Paul theologizes out of an apocalyptic framework as he envisions God’s redeeming action as a divine power that invades and transforms the cosmos, a cosmos enslaved by the cosmic powers of Sin and Death.  The ‘sending’ of the Son marks the invasion of God’s rectifying power to save a world polluted and imperiled by evil in order bring about God’s glory over all things. This is, as Käsemann abruptly put it, God’s act to repossess the world for himself, or, as Wright memorably states, it is God’s plan to put the world to rights. The sending of the Son is an alien and intrusive action that causes a virtual melt-down to competing theologies that saw Israel’s Torah as somehow indelibly connected to Israel’s deliverance. Yet on the other hand, such a radical protrusion of God’s rescuing-power upon the people of Israel and their world is precisely the story that many Jews had been telling, hoping, writing, praying, and imagining since the exile. In Paul’s telling, God’s dramatic act of deliverance in Messiah Jesus comes both to Israel and through Israel, as Israel is the prism through which God’s salvific light shines and so repels and dispels the dark powers who held the world in the vice-like grip of its power.

HT: to Tim Gombis who inspired my thinking on these lines!