StT: Galatians 3:10-12

(A little more from Gospel Red Herring: Spiritualizing the Text.)

Galatians 3:10-12

Westerners tend to demand a semantic precision that is often absent in the New Testament. In this context, Paul uses the term “law” (Grk: nomos) in place of “covenant” — more precisely, he refers here to living under the Covenant of Moses as a whole. His point here is that Abraham was under a different sort of covenant entirely. While the Covenant of Moses is a specific implementation of the more general Covenant of Noah, the Covenant of Abraham was not a law covenant, but a personal commitment of faith. We would certainly say that such a personal faith commitment is implied by the Law Covenants, but is actually more demanding. Paul thus uses the term “faith” to indicate such a personal commitment. You can stick with a Law Covenant or you can move above it into a Faith Covenant. The former will make you tolerable to God and bring a limited set of blessings. The latter connects you directly to God on a different plane entirely.

Western Christians have a woefully poor understanding of covenants, frequently making mental substitution of contract law instead.

It’s worth noting that Paul says that the Covenant of Moses is just about good enough to keep slaves in line, but is hardly adequate to express genuine faith. Thus, he constructs a scandalous allegory in Chapter 4 that says those under Moses were never more than slaves, while those who actually embraced the faith of Abraham were God’s own heirs. The Jews claiming to be children of Abraham were simply recipients of his DNA, not the heirs to his covenant.