The Nature of Paul’s Gospel
Paul’s gospel was not, unlike many modern versions of the gospel, a timeless and abstract system of truth propositions. Paul’s gospel was a public declaration and not a mere personal invitation. Paul’s gospel was the proclamation of the universal Lordship of Jesus the Messiah and the breaking of the Kingdom of God into history. The gospel was no more a ‘personal invitation’ than the proclamation of a Roman emperor’s accession to the throne would be. The gospel was a public fact. Every empire, kingdom, government and ruler was called to take heed and obey the gospel.
Paul did not believe that the sphere of the kingdom of God was limited to the human heart. The gospel, the proclamation of this new kingdom, was to be embodied as a social reality. In Galatians 2:14 Paul claims that Peter and the other Jews were not being straightforward about ‘the truth of the gospel’. This was a response to Peter’s withdrawing from fellowship with Gentiles. It is very clear that Paul considered the ‘truth of the gospel’ to be more than just the beliefs of the church. The ‘truth of the gospel’ was to be incarnated in the practices of the church.
Peter clearly was not denying the legitimacy of Paul’s Gentile mission in public statements. In all probability Peter was one of the staunchest defenders of the legitimacy of the Gentile mission. However, he was denying its legitimacy in his practices. By withdrawing from fellowship with Gentiles he was denying the fact that God had made Jews and Gentiles one in the Messiah.
If the gospel was true in declaring that God had made no distinction between Jew and Gentile and that they were one in Jesus, it was a serious thing for Peter to allow the old distinctions to creep back into the church. The church was to embody the reconciliation that it proclaimed. If God really has made no distinction between Jews and Gentiles, this distinction is one to be overcome within the church. If the church acts as if this distinction still exists, it is going against the truth of the gospel.
Richard Hays expresses the question that was being faced in Antioch very well:
At the end of the day, was there to be one church or two “separate but equal” churches? … Was there to be one table where Jews and Gentiles could eat together as brothers and sisters in Christ, or was it necessary to maintain two separate tables, symbolizing the separate cultural identity of the Jewish Christians?
Peter’s belief that Jews and Gentiles were one in Christ was next to worthless if he was unwilling to embody it in his praxis.
Peter might have been unwilling to theologically defend the division between Jews and Gentiles in Antioch. He seemed to be more intent upon keeping up good appearances with the Jews. Had he been acting on the basis of theological convictions he would have sought to live consistently as a Jew himself (cf. 2:14). In all likelihood, Peter believed that he could go along with the cultural exclusivity of the Jews and still maintain that God made no distinction between Jew and Gentile. He was acting on fear and not on principle (as, in all probability, were the men from James).
Paul demonstrated that it was insufficient to theologically assert the equality of Jews and Gentiles without positively embodying the fact in praxis. The gospel is a message about God being reconciled with men. The gospel is a message about transformed lives, and a message that transforms lives. The gospel is a message that declares the new creation and effects the new creation. The regeneration of Israel and the recreating of the world is what the gospel is all about. The gospel cannot be abstracted from reality. The gospel is about a public fact.
The Gospel versus the Status Quo
If the gospel declares that the distinction between Jews and Gentiles has been broken down, Christians are called to actively live out this fact. Peter and the men from James might have wished to avoid appearing revolutionary in their challenge to the status quo. However, they were called to challenge the status quo. Even were they to accept the status quo whilst denying it any normative role, they would still be undermining the gospel. The status quo, which embodied a distinction between Jews and Gentiles, was to be actively broken down.
Suppose a father and mother adopted a new child. They inform their children that they now have a new brother. It is not enough for the other children to proclaim this to be true as a mere propositional truth; they must treat their new brother as a brother. Were they to exclude their adopted brother from their activities they could not excuse themselves by saying that they were not denying the proposition that he was their brother. In a like manner, if God had adopted the Gentiles into His family, the Jewish believers were to treat them as brothers with all of the privileges that they themselves possessed. Segregation simply wasn’t an option. The status quo had to be overturned.
The gospel by its very nature rules out its being reduced to indicatives that we can passively recite. The gospel is an imperative, an imperative to challenge the status quo and to live out the reality that has been ushered in by the Messiah. Peter, whether he liked it or not, was called to live in a way that was scandalous and offensive to his Jewish compatriots. He was to break the taboos of his old Jewish culture in order to embrace a new culture, the culture of the kingdom of God. He was to break down the old distinctions and live according to new ones.
The gospel presents a challenge to all other cultures. Every claim to cultural exclusivity is nullified by it. A gospel that permitted the practice of Jewish exclusivity within the church would be a neutered gospel. If the claim of the Jews to exclusivity were not challenged, how could the gospel challenge the claims of the empire of Rome to exclusivity? Paul was defending the supremacy of the culture of the kingdom of God, over against the existing cultures. The Christian faith could not be assimilated to Judaism; Jews must submit to the gospel. The practice of Jewish exclusivity by Peter represented a challenge to the cultural imperative presented by the gospel and to the supremacy of God’s kingdom over all other kingdoms. No culture can tame the gospel. The gospel cannot be domesticated to Jewish culture; Jewish culture must be transformed and changed by the gospel.
Of course, I can’t wait to apply this all. However, before I go into a detailed application, I would like to give closer attention to Paul’s doctrine of justification in the context of Galatians 2. I hope to engage with the common evangelical reading of the passage and to demonstrate that it is untenable in the light of what Paul has actually written. Having done more ground work, I will be able to make some fuller applications later on.
