The Death of One World and the Advent of Another

Galatians 3:23-29

In a 1985 article in New Testament Studies, J. Louis Martyn writes about Gal. 3:27-28, "There was a world whose fundamental structures were certain pairs of opposites:

circumcision / uncircumcision
Jew / Gentile
slave / freeman
male / female.

"Thales, Socrates, and Plato—not to mention the later Rabbi Judah—finding themselves in such a world, may give thanks that they exist on the preferable side of the divide. Those who have been baptized into Christ, however, know that, in Christ, that world does not any longer have real existence" (New Testament Studies 31 [Jl 1985] : 415).

Christ does not transfer us to the preferable side of the divide. Christ breaks down the dividing wall (Eph. 2:14). Martyn summarizes the message of Galatians by saying, "Perhaps… Paul is telling the Galatians that the whole of his epistle is not about the better of two mystagogues, or even about the better of two ways, and certainly not about the failure of Judaism. He is saying, rather, that the letter is about the death of one world, and the advent of another" (414).

Monday I heard part of a Talk of the Nation segment on a book called Status Anxiety. The author's subject is the need that humans feel to be loved, not just by a partner or family member, but by "the world," and his book details the resources that philosophy and art offer to combat feelings of low status or inadequacy. But what if the whole status search itself "no longer has any real existence?" The very hardest thing about graduate school for me was the feeling of always coming up short—everything confirmed my low status, from thinking of a witty, apropos remark long after some lunch conversation was over to recognizing the flaws in one of my papers upon rereading it a semester later. Status anxiety was the name of the game, and scores in the game were everything! Could I even have heard it if someone had said to me, "Sure you need to apply yourself to this work; it will be good if you are a competent student and a competent teacher someday, but it is only good because your neighbor needs your work to be done well. As for your status, the only status you have is as 'Abraham's offspring, an heir according to the promise' (Gal. 3:29)? Would that message have changed anything about the way I did my work and the way I worked together with others?

Having been gone from an academic setting for a year, I have returned to see more clearly (at least for a few weeks until I re-assimilate) the way we divide ourselves up around here:

tenured / untenured
MA / MDiv
faculty / staff
Lutheran / not-Lutheran.

At this point, if you are Lutheran you may be thinking, "But wait a minute, you're forgetting Luther's 'Two Kingdoms' doctrine. Distinctions like these exist in the 'kingdom on the left,' and are necessary for our work, but of course they have nothing to do with our salvation." OK, but then if these distinctions matter in such a limited way, why are we so invested in them? Why, in your context, does it matter if someone is an associate pastor or a co-pastor? Or why does it matter what car someone drives, or what neighborhood they live in? Most of us grace-centered Christians get confused on this point: we know that our worth comes solely from Christ and our being in Christ, but then we act like all sorts of other things matter tremendously. We judge ourselves, and often we judge others, based on a host of status markers like education, income, industriousness, restaurant tastes, table manners—whatever. We find ways to set up structures like those of the old age over and over again.

To this, Paul says, "It's over." You can diddle around in that world if you like, but you do so at the risk of becoming enslaved once again to "elemental spirits of the world" (Gal. 4:3), that is, to the binary structures on which the old world was built. Do you really want to play that game? There's no future there and certainly no freedom. You'll always be measuring where you stand and worrying about losing status. You'll lose sight of your neighbor as a neighbor and see him only as a competitor for your rung on the ladder. And all this will be for naught because that old world of opposites "No longer has any real existence" anyway! For freedom Christ has set you free from those divisions and from the search for status they imply. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.