Recreating the Cosmos: A Holistic Reading of Paul’s Letter to the Galatians

By Jeremy W. Barrier

This book is a meditation on Paul's letter to the church in Galatia with the purpose of reclaiming Paul for those of faith who have grown tired of thinking that Christians are the people who draw lines, make distinctions, and police religious borders. This book is an attempt to reclaim the vision of Paul that is beyond Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female: the new creation. Ultimately, the vision of Paul was not Paul's vision, but God's vision of the cosmos.
 
As readers reclaim this vision of a new creation, they begin to reclaim God's new creation experienced in our lives and within the world around us. God, as the grand creator of the cosmos, is attempting to inject the same creative process into the cosmos through humans. Rather than simply seeing humans as the destroyers of the cosmos, Barrier invites us to consider this beautiful thought: "The earth could be renewed daily by . . . humanity."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Jun 27, 2017
• ISBN: 9781532601941

Jeremy W. Barrier

Jeremy W. Barrier is Associate Professor of Biblical Literature and Director of the Graduate Program at Heritage Christian University in Florence, Alabama. He is the author of a number of academic journal articles and books, such as The Acts of Paul and Thecla: A Critical Introduction and Commentary (2009).

Book preview

9781532601934.kindle.jpg

Recreating the Cosmos

A Holistic Reading of Paul’s Letter to the Galatians

Jeremy W. Barrier

3801.png

Recreating the Cosmos

A Holistic Reading of Paul’s Letter to the Galatians

Copyright © 2017 Jeremy W. Barrier. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-0193-4

hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-0195-8

ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-0194-1

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Names: Barrier, Jeremy W.

Title: Recreating the cosmos : a holistic reading of Paul’s letter to the Galatians / Jeremy W. Barrier

Description: Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2017 | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: isbn 978-1-5326-0193-4 (paperback) | isbn 978-1-5326-0195-8 (hardcover) | isbn 978-1-5326-0194-1 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Bible. Galatians—Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Classification: bs2685.2 b2 2017 (print) | bs2685.2 (ebook)

New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Manufactured in the U.S.A. 03/13/17

Table of Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Salt

Chapter 1: Shift

Chapter 2: On Maledictions

Chapter 3: Action Reaction Dialogue

Chapter 4: Rescue

Chapter 5: Fog

Chapter 6: Wash my Blood

Chapter 7: Walk On

Chapter 8: Slavery

Chapter 9: Lost Identity

Chapter 10: Breathe It In

Chapter 11: Turning the Tables

Chapter 12: Scars for the New Creation

Bibliography

For my one and only love, Robin.

Acknowledgments

The mention of acknowledgments is a dangerous thing. Attempting to remember everyone who deserves mention from the last five years of writing and researching is too much for my mind to recall, but I shall make the effort. First, I am thankful to my president, Dennis Jones, for allowing me to be away in Germany for ten months. In particular, I thank Bill Bagents for making the suggestion for this project. I am thankful to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for the invitation to spend these ten months as a fellow at the University of Regensburg. I thank Tobias and Evi Nicklas for their constant generosity and kindness to us as strangers in a strange land. Thank you to Mrs. Goricnik who will forever be my children’s German grandmother. Thank you also to Barbara, Joachim, and Vincent, who shared so much of your lives with us! Thank you, Brad McKinnon, for allowing me to read the chapters in Wednesday chapel at HCU; and to the students, faculty, and staff who listened to these chapters for an entire semester! I am thankful to Whitney Burgess for editing the entire manuscript prior to publication! Thank you, Nathan Daily, for your friendship and countless hours of theological discussions about Paul.

Of greater significance, I thank my children for showing me the beauty of creation and the hope of a recreation in the cosmos. I am most grateful to my dear Robin who has been a constant source of inspiration and encouragement to me. You have taught me so much, given so much, and loved so much.

introduction

Salt

Farewell, farewell! but this I tell

To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!

He prayeth well, who loveth well

Both man and bird and beast.

He prayeth best, who loveth best

All things both great and small;

For the dear god who loveth us

He made and loveth all.

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, 1798

Throw It Out

"I guess we should throw it out!" she said. My spouse, Robin, was getting ready to warm up the left-over spaghetti . . . on day six. Don’t get me wrong. I love spaghetti, especially when we do it just right. I mean cooking the noodles al dente; adding all of the fresh, chopped, minced herbs from the garden like basil, oregano, and rosemary; throwing in the sumptuous Italian sausages; culminating with the finishing touch of a few scrapes of Parmesan on top. Can’t beat it.

Day two . . . it’s even better. The flavors and juices have all blended together. It’s served up with a side salad of cucumbers, croutons, and a touch of olive oil with balsamic vinegar—ah, fine dining at its best!

Day three . . . well. I’m not so sure. We have found the tipping point. Imagining that I am a child, standing on a seesaw on the playground, arms outstretched, head focused on my feet taking one step at a time, while nearing the center point of the seesaw—the fulcrum. I take one more step toward the center, and the seesaw begins to tip the other direction. This is spaghetti on day three.

Day six . . . you know how this story ends. My two kids cry out, What’s for dinner? Not spaghetti again! This is the moment my wife has a revelation: I guess we should throw it out! From the perspective of the reader, this is probably a no-brainer (Of course, you would throw it out!), as you sit and assess from the couch at home in a totally analytical way. However, at the time, when you love spaghetti, and you poured your heart and soul into it, sometimes the decision is not all that clear. Sometimes the scales are tipping so slowly that you lose the ability to be able to see it.

Well, I suppose this is all true, but, hey, I’m talking about spaghetti! If it smells bad, you throw it out.

This phenomenon of approaching the center point—and the tables turning and being completely oblivious to the fact—is such a common daily occurrence that we, as humans, rarely realize what side of an issue we are on, or where we have been. Changes are so incremental and small that from one day to the next, it seems practically impossible to monitor the changes. Have I gained a pound or two? the woman says looking in the mirror and having trouble buttoning the jeans that seemed to (barely) fit last week. Is that a gray hair? my brother asks me, before sipping his coffee during breakfast. Check out my new 46 HD TV! says Greg, my neighbor, as we stop by after taking the kids for a walk. As I check it out, I’m not exactly sure why this one is superior to his last 46 HD TV. It’s in the number of megapixels, he assures me as I stare, squinting my eyes, trying to see the difference. I am talking about these incremental changes. Changes that are so slow, so gradual, that one is not quite sure where they are in the process. One is not sure how far they have regressed or progressed.

Salt and Scraps

During the last year, I’ve been living with my family in a World Heritage Site, Regensburg, Germany, located on one of the longest and oldest highways of the known world, called the Danube River. We live about half a mile from the beautiful Donau River, as spoken in German. Daily, we watch the dozens of barges moving back and forth from the heart of Germany all the way through Vienna, Budapest, and on to the Black Sea. One day, while my family was visiting the World Heritage Site museum located right on the river, next to a beautiful 1,200-year-old stone bridge, I was fascinated to find out that Regensburg, along with many other cities of Bavaria, built their fortunes in the Middle Ages through the transport and monitoring of salt. Not far down the river, in the musical city of Salzburg (literally salt fortress), the hometown of Mozart, I was equally impressed by the thousands of miles of labyrinthine tunnels that were devoted to the mining and extraction of salt; this white gold considered so precious, and expensive for humans to own and possess!

Jesus told his audience in Matt 5:13 as he sat on that hill near the Sea of Galilee,

You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot . . .

This concept is not all that difficult to understand, as it is quite clear what good salt can do for food. It’s no wonder that salt is called white gold as it is surely the essential for dinners at home. In the words of Robert Duvall, who stated it plainly in an interview with the Washington Post, One thing I like about Argentina, they only cook with salt; that’s it.

The interesting part about the quote from Jesus is His statement regarding salt losing its value. Can saltiness be restored? This is an interesting thought. Can six-day-old spaghetti be restored? Not likely. Can salt in six-day-old spaghetti be extracted? Well, not really, unless you are an organic chemist. I wonder whether or not Jesus’ audience thought of themselves as this common table commodity or not. Were they the salt of the earth, or did they think Jesus was talking about someone else? What Jesus is trying to suggest is that there are forms of salt that, for all practical purposes, are virtually useless. They may have salt, or be salt, but they are so diluted, or polluted, that they don’t have value, and the fine line between the good and the bad is not always so clear.

Reading Scripture

This arbitrary, unclear, gray line between the good and the bad is incredibly difficult to identify, yet we all seem to know it is there. Some religious leaders invest their entire life attempting to identify exactly where the line should be drawn—exactly where the border should be placed, so that everyone will clearly understand who is on one side, and who is on the other side. It is like taking tweezers and, grain by grain, identifying the good salt from the polluted salt. Excruciating work.

In Paul’s letter to the Galatians, a book written some 1,950 years ago, I found that here was a text, written by an apostle of God, where a border had been drawn. Or so it seemed. For at least 500 years, Christians took from these raw pieces of logic and emotion a tour de force for redefining the Christian experience as one dictated and determined by the grace of God, rather than the justification of God. A reaction, no doubt, against forces of the Catholicism that in their world appeared to be the oppressor and determiner of the thin red lines that demarcated the faithful from the faithless; the native and the foreigner; the salt and the scraps.

However, as I read Galatians, in which mountains of pages and caverns filled with mashed and dried tree pulp have been filled, I began to realize that the book could be described in other ways. It is not merely a magnum opus on salvation by God’s gift of grace, as opposed to God’s justification and judgment. The picture that emerged for me was one that did not force me to choose between the God that I would serve—one of justice or one of mercy. Instead, I found that this dichotomy was false. There was no decision to be made. I saw in Paul a desire for both. In Gal 6:15, Paul made the profound statement, Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything; what counts is the new creation. Understanding that this statement will need a degree of unpacking in a later chapter, allow me to simply say at this time, that Paul was emphasizing that it was not a choice between some old way and the new way. It was not a choice of ritual or freedom that had to be made. It was not those who are circumcised or those who are uncircumcised that are more valuable or important. It is simply the new creation. Regeneration. A new cosmos. It is a complete, totally new, never before witnessed version of the cosmos. It is the universe as never witnessed with the eyes.

Disconnects

I am absolutely in love with Paul’s imagery. I love the idea of the children of God being a new creation. I love the imagery of the children of God being the salt of the earth, but I cannot help but feel some sort of disconnect here. Is this the reputation that Christians have in the world today? Is this what we see in North America today?

On December 26, 1966, Lynn Townsend White Jr., standing before the Washington meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences gave a bold presentation entitled The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis, and subsequently published the findings in the journal Science in 1967. This presentation was astounding in its claim that Western Christianity bears a substantial burden of guilt for the present environmental crisis. At this point, I fear that I just lost three-fourths of my readers, but if you made it up to this sentence, please hold on for a few more sentences and allow me to make my point.

While all of what White claimed may be debated and criticized, allow me to make one point from this observation. Why is it not the case that Christians are known in the world as the people who are investing their time and energy into the balancing of the cosmos? Why aren’t Christians primarily known as the people who want to move into a community, create sustainable viable jobs, create sustainable ecosystems, promoting renewable, cheap energy that harnesses the wind or the sun? In sum, why aren’t Christians on the forefront of improving the environment, leading research groups to balance overpopulation, leading the way toward peace negotiations in the Middle East, or any number of scenarios that could be considered?

Maybe there are more Christians in these