In 1971 I went to Glasgow University as an Arts undergraduate. I was three years a Christian, a Baptist an avowed Evangelical and then some. My major subjects were Moral Philosophy and Principles of Religion. This was to be an education in learning to think for myself with critical appreciation, developing intellectual humility and willingness to question my certainties.
Principles of Religion included critical study of sacred texts from the Bhagavad Gita, Deuteronomy, the tractate Pirkei Avot from the Mishnah, the Hindu Scriptures, the Quran, and yes, Paul’s letter to the Galatians. Welcome to comparative religion and the phenomenological study of religious experience!
We had to do a critical exegesis of selected passages from each of those texts, explaining the cultural context, key religious concepts, analysing the religious experience that underlay the text, and which the text evoked and reinforced. I was back studying Galatians, but with very different aims.
At that time there were few recent critical commentaries dealing with the English text of Galatians – (Greek would come later in my Divinity studies). That’s when I bought Donald Guthrie’s 1969 commentary on Galatians in the New Century Bible. I made my way through Guthrie’s solid, careful and compact exegesis, and cherry picked two Greek commentaries (Lightfoot and De Witt Burton) as best I could. I passed the course and won the class prize!
I mention the prize only because the two lecturers insisted that class assignments were pieces of research and evidenced argument – not opportunities to push a conservative evangelical line! If I wanted to argue a position, I had to make that case, evaluate the evidence and construct a reasoned argument.
Here’s how that worked. One essay was on the authorship of Deuteronomy; I still have that essay! By the 1970s the mainstream position rejected the sole authorship of Moses. My first sentence was, “Much as I would prefer to establish the Mosaic authorship of Deuteronomy, the arguments for an editorial process would seem to be more persuasive.” Nick Wyatt was the marker and he wrote in the margin alongside that first sentence, “Tough!” That comment was written with a grin and not an iota of hurtful intent. We got on very well, and he was a superb teacher.
So that was my first critical study of biblical texts, Deuteronomy and Galatians. It was in an Arts course, and I was being trained to read a text with critical questions and respectful care. Donald Guthrie’s commentary was seen as conservative then, and still is. But like all his work, Guthrie had done his homework. Of course Guthrie on Galatians is long eclipsed by newer approaches of far greater length and complexity, including rhetorical studies, social science, new perspectives on Paul, and rival theological interpretations.
It would take time, and much wider and deeper study, for me to be adequately equipped before I was able to explore Galatians, or any other biblical text, with the proper tools, skills and training. But Galatians, which had entered my spiritual bloodstream through John Stott’s pastoral and theological exposition, was now a text that was problematic. Not in a negative sense, but as a text that refuses to be tamed and neatly tied up as a parcel of fully understandable theology. Galatians was written to provoke, to confront, to persuade, to change minds and transform worldview and lifestyle. That much I had already grasped.
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