THE FAITH OF ABRAHAM

Worshipping "Whoever Made All This..."

My wanderings through the letter to the Galatians have taken me to some pretty interesting places, but none more so than Paul’s embracing of the faith of Abraham. I won’t paste all the passages here, but you can look them up. Paul lays out his approach in Gal 3:6-9, then expands it in 3:15-18 and 3:26-28, before landing the argument in Gal 4:21-26 and Gal 4:30-31.

The essence of what Paul has to say is this. The Jewish people believe that their faith is built on observance of the Mosaic Law, so they expect the same to apply to Jesus. If Jesus is the servant Son of the God Yahweh who gave the Law to Moses, why would he not be faithful to it? And why would his followers not be bound by it? It’s clear that Paul does not want to embrace a kind of radical replacement theology, where all traces of Jewish tradition are swept from the table and Jesus launches a whole new religion. Jesus is the Jewish Messiah and must be, for Paul, the fulfilment of the Jewish hope. How then can Jesus also be the hope of the Gentiles? How can he be the Messiah for those who don’t even know what the law demands of them - even those whom faithful Jews have been told not to mix with?

Must we choose between on the one hand embracing Jewish traditions and laws, simply adding the worship of Jesus to them, or on the other hand rejecting Jewish history and faith altogether and starting over from zero with Christ? Or might there be a third way: a way of being faithful to God’s revelation of his person and character to the Jews whilst at the same time moving on from the limitations of Law-observance?