Galatians and Christian Theology by Mark W. Elliott & Scott J. Hafemann & N. T. Wright & and John Frederick & eds

Author:Mark W. Elliott & Scott J. Hafemann & N. T. Wright & and John Frederick & eds. [Elliott, Mark W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL006100, REL067000, REL067070, Bible (Galatians—Criticism, interpretation, etc.), New Testament Book (Galatians)
ISBN: 9781441245892
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2014-08-22T00:00:00+00:00

It Is Story Time

If time is warped in Galatians and if “in the Galatian context Paul’s interest in time is dominated by his concern to affirm the termination of slavery under the law after Christ,”18 it nonetheless seems to me that a certain sequence of events or episodes is present and significant. In his monograph The Faith of Jesus Christ, Hays remarks, “At least since Aristotle [see Poetics 1450B], people have been sagely observing that every story must have a beginning, a middle, and an end.”19 Hays then turns to note that the French semiotician A. J. Greimas incorporated this “conventional wisdom” when he posited that a “fundamental narrative structure is composed of three ‘sequences’”: the initial sequence, the topical sequence, and the final sequence. Hays explains these three sequences thus: “The initial and final sequences are called ‘correlated sequences,’ because they are related to one another in a very specific way: the final sequence represents the completion of a task that was somehow stymied in the initial sequence or the reestablishing of an order that was disrupted in the initial sequence. The ‘topical’ sequence is so called because it forms the center of attention (‘topic’) of the story. A single story may have several topical sequences (the more complex the story, the more of these are likely to appear).”20

Here, I apply Greimas’s fundamental narratival model, as presented by Hays, to the apocalyptic story Paul spins in Galatians. I would like to do so in seven steps under three headings—the sequences set forth by Greimas. Unlike Hays, I will not seek to move beyond narrative sequences to narrative syntagmas. That being said, as Hays rightly observes, “The thing that matters is the message of the text, the story that it tells and interprets. Methodology is a secondary and instrumental concern.”21 Similarly, Nils Dahl notes “that the really burning questions cannot be answered in principle but only through constant new encounter with the material.”22 Even as Paul wrote in large letters in concluding Galatians (6:11), in what follows I will necessarily employ rather broad brushstrokes in treating Galatians.

The Initial Sequence: The Time before Faith

Although Paul, of course, wrote Galatians subsequent to the revelation of faith/Christ in general and his proclamation of the gospel in Galatia in particular, in the course of his letter he will at times consider matters from the vantage point of “before faith came” (πρὸ τοῦ δὲ ἐλθεῖν τὴν πίστιν, 3:23). When he does so, the picture he paints is anything but pretty. Looking back over his spiritual shoulder, Paul sees the power and sinister effects of sin(s) (1:4; 3:22) and people enslaved to the στοιχεῖα τοῦ κόσμου (4:3), to the φύσει μὴ οὖσιν θεοῖς (4:8) (cf. 4:24, 25; 5:1).

Faith in God the Father (1:1, 3, 4; 4:6), who is one (ὁ δὲ θεὸς εἷς ἐστιν, 3:20), was not altogether absent in this epoch. Father Abraham evinced as much, and righteousness was resultantly credited to his account (3:6; cf. Gen. 15:6; Rom. 4:3). The promise that all the nations would be blessed in faithful Abraham (3:8; cf.

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