Corpus-Paul

["Roy E. Ciampa" <Roy_Ciampa AT compuserve.com>]

Dear Anders,

        Thank you very much for your clarification.  I am sorry that I have
not had the opportunity to read your paper.  It sounds very interesting.  I
suspected that I might have misread your position and am therefore grateful
for your comments.

        I sounds as though we may be pretty close in our thinking.  I
certainly agree the presentation is slanted (can't think of many that are
not!).  My latest post also implied that Paul's "opponents" would not have
been happy about the way Paul represents their position.  I'm not sure Paul
was all that concerned about being a nice guy in this instance.  Seems he
had bigger fish to fry.  While fully recognizing that Paul is in the middle
of a rhetorical battle here, I do not feel the need to condemn him.  In
fact, I will try to defend him.  You may simply decide that I have fallen
prey to Paul's rhetoric.  I think the rhetoric actually reveals a real
problem with the position being promoted in Galatia.

        Let me quote part of my earlier post and then try to defend Paul's
argument.
I said:

"Another perfectly Perelmanian approach to this text (which I, among
others, have defended elsewhere) would suggest that some people (the new
teachers in Galatia, for example) had a concept of justification which
entailed both faith and works of the law together without seeing any
problem with the two elements, in fact not seeing them as two different
things but two sides of the same coin.  But Paul divides the concept in
such a way that suggests that people have to choose between the two things
that they used to hold together.  According to him it is not "that" (works
of the law) but "this" (faith) and "this" (faith) belongs to us, but "that"
(works of the law) belongs to them (as though the new teachers did not
teach the importance of faith in Christ!)."

        The fact that the other teachers work with a notion of
justification that entails both faith and justification (and not simply
justification, as someone might surmise from Paul's statements) does not
change the fact that (as I understand it) they are working within a
paradigm that requires that Gentiles accept the Mosaic covenant and law in
order to belong to God's people.  Paul understands that the Mosaic covenant
and law were to remain in effect until the coming of Christ, but that those
in Christ have died to that former world and now live in the
post-resurrection, post-Mosaic reality of the new creation.  For him works
of the law and faith are certainly NOT two sides of the same coin, but the
defining features of two different communities and ages.  In other words, I
am willing to suggest that some ideas _need_ to be dissociated, and this is
one of them!  The fact that the other teachers were also teaching faith is
much less relevant to the argument than the fact that they were still
requiring works of the law, a requirement that is unacceptable in the
context of the new situation brought about by Christ.

        Thus, in my view, Paul's use of the dissociation of ideas does not
prove that he is a bad guy or that his argument was simply a rhetorical
means to an end.  It was the right argument to reveal the key problem in
the position of his opponents.

        Yes, I'm biased.

        Thanks for the discussion!

        Roy Ciampa