Corpus-Paul

["John Brand" <jbrand AT gvsd.mb.ca>]

I would like to throw out the following question for consideration by 
the list: Is it not more exegetically fruitful and imminently more 
practical given our current fragmentation in the church to assume 
that salvation is of the Jews rather than the Gentile?

I always look forward to following Mark Nanos' interaction on the 
list. I came to embrace a Jewish (OT) perspective in my Christian 
faith because of exegetical issues which surrounded the 
interpretation of Galatians 2:16 vis a vis the anomalistic, yet, 
nonetheless pervasive translation of ean mh in a contrastive sense in 
Protestant commentaries. Thus, I would argue that weltanshauung does 
not determine interpretation of this important epistle.

If we were to adopt the thesis of J. Louis Martyn [("A Law-Observant 
Mission to Gentiles," The Galatians Debate), 348ff], we would have to 
say with Jesus that 'salvation is of the Jews.' It seems to me that, 
currently, the vast majority in Christendom would have to disagree 
with Jesus and say that 'salvation is no longer of the Jews, they 
have defaulted; salvation is now of the Gentiles.' And that appears 
to have been further refined in church history to say 'salvation is 
of the Reformed' or 'of the Catholic' or 'of the Pentecostals;' for, 
it seems to me that this is the situation in our modern day church. 
In other words, in our effort to find the 'true church' we seemed to 
have misunderstood what the church was about in the NT.

Given the current situation, however, I would argue that it is more 
useful to interpret the Galatian situation as arising from the 
halakhic implications of the Jerusalem council (Acts 15) which 
assumed that salvation was of the Jew and that the mission was to the 
Jew and the Gentile. Since the Gentiles there were given very few 
halakhic guidelines and none that they would not have embraced from 
there own weltanshauung, it would follow that Paul's statement that 
the gospel is all about 'faith working through love' (Galatians 5:6) 
would lead to a unity in our modern day church. That is, if we were 
to accept the opinions of the various approaches to Christianity 
without passing judgment on them vis a vis their claim to be 
representative of the true church, we could enjoy a variety of 
'faiths' without compromising the one gospel that unites truly 
'Christian' faith according to Gerd Ludemann (i.e. the resurrection 
of Christ as per 1 Corinthians 15:1-5 and Romans 1:3-5).

Interaction around this perspective would be appreciated, if any one 
is interested either pro or contra.

Regards,

John Brand
Manitoba, Canada

B.A. (Providence College, 1980)
M.Min. (Providence Seminary, 1990)