Wednesday, May 18, 2022

Hans Boersma on Galatians 3:10-13 and the "Curse" not being the Forensic Imputation of the Sins of Sinners

  

There are a number of serious problems with this type of reading. First, one of its consequences is a tendency to separate the Old and the New Testaments means of salvation. This reading assumes that salvation in the Old Testament was based on works (Lev. 18;5), while in the New Testament it is based on faith. It seems difficult to accept in the Old Testament God would use a means of salvation that in New Testament times is considered erroneous, or even heretical; the presumed Judaizing (and Catholic!) the error of works righteous. Second, the assumption that St. Paul had an “introspective conscience” cannot withstand careful scrutiny of his letters. Throughout these letters we meet a confident St. Paul—confident not only after but seen before his Damascus Road experience (cf. Phil. 3:6). This is not to say that Paul thought that he had been sinless or perfect in obeying the Law. But he took comfort from the fact that under the Law, Israelites could atone for their sins by means of repentance, sacrifice, and restitution, not all sins resulted in punishment. Finally, and perhaps most seriously, the traditional Protestant reading belittles hospitality because it works with a strict economy of exchange. The covenantal relationship between God and human beings takes on strongly contractual connotations. The stranger has secured a place in the home not by an unconditional gift but by means of a contractual agreement (with the elect being allotted to Christ on the basis of his agreement to suffer in their stead). Nouwen’s notion that the father “cannot force, constrain, push or pull” the prodigal appears to be lost (Henry J. Noumen, The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming [New York: Image-Doubleday], 95).

 

It seems to me that we need to opt for a national-historical reading of this passage, one that does not ignore its juridical and covenantal overtones—it plainly contains penal language—but that makes the judicial elements subservient to the hospitality that God extends in Jesus Christ. St. Paul’s quotation of Deuteronomy 27:26 is highly significant, because this text is part of a larger covenant document (Deuteronomy 27-30) and needs to be read in that context. N. T. Wright explains the context as follows:

 

It describes, and indeed appears to enact, the making of the covenant in Moab, the covenant which holds that our blessing and curse. The blessing and curse are not merely “take-it-or-leave-it” options: Deuteronomy declares that Israel will in fact eventually make the wrong choice, and, as a result, suffer the curse of all curses, that is, exile (Deuteronomy 28:15-29:29). But that will not be the end of the story, or of the covenant. Deuteronomy 30 then holds out hope the other side of covenant failure, a hope of covenant renewal, of the re-gathering of the people after exile, of the circumcision of the heart, of the word being “near you, on your lips and in your heart” (30:1-14). In other words, Deuteronomy 27-30 is all about exile and restoration, understood as covenant judgment and covenant renewal. (N. T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992], 140)

 

The Mosaic covenant was an arrangement that God made not with one individual but with an entire nation. This also means that the covenant curse of exile would fall on the entire nation. The Deuteronomic Law insists that Israel as a whole—despite the uprightness of individual believers—would consistently reject the very aim of repentance and sacrifice, namely, restoration of and growth in the relationship with Yahweh. The book of Deuteronomy leads up to the divine prediction of the rebellion of Israel, of its rejection of the monotheist confession of the Shema as the heart of the Law (Deut. 6:4-6). The book thus leads to the culmination of exile as the curse of the Law (Deut. 28:32, 36-37, 49-52, 63-68; 29:28; 31:16-22, 29. The Song of Moses that the Israelites are to sing [Deuteronomy 32] is to function as a judicial self-indictment]). The Deuteronomic history books (Joshua-2 Kings) trace the apostasy of God’s people, which finally results in the exilic curse.

 

Significantly, exile is God’s last option. He resorts to this climactic punishment when it becomes clear that Israel as a whole consistently refused to repent and so to obtain forgiveness and a restoration of the relationship with Yahweh (Again, this is not to say that individual Israelites would not have had their relationship with God restored by the Old Testament means of reconciliation. Scripture [in particular the Psalms] calls many people “righteous.” The point is that Israel as a whole did not abide by Torah and its means of reconciliation). God does not delight in punishment but keeps the violence of penal force at bay as much as possible. What is more, the punishment of exile as the curse of the Law serves to salvage the realization of monotheistic worship as the very heart of the Law. The punishment serves the purpose of pure, eschatological hospitality: the Father’s eternal embrace of the prodigal son. “Punishment may be necessary . . . but it is not the pain of punishment itself that achieves justice, as though justice resides in creating equity of suffering, the pain of offenders’ punishments compensating for the pain inflicted on victims. True justice in the restoring of relationships and the recreation of shalom (Romans 5) “ (Marshall, Beyond Retribution, 69).

 

When St. Paul quotes the Deuteronomic invocation of the curse, he is assuming that Israel has, in fact, suffered the curse of the Law in the historical punishment of exile. In other words, the “curse of the Law” is not some eternal principle that results from any and every transgression of the commandment, but it refers to the historical judgment of exile against Israel because of its consistent rejection of divine hospitality. Despite the partial return of the Jews in the sixth century B.C., St. Paul saw the Jewish nation of his day still oppressed by foreigners and therefore still in exile. According to a national-historical interpretation of Galatians 3, therefore, St. Paul maintains that in his death Christ has suffered Israel’s exile: “Christ, as the representative Messiah, has achieved a specific task, that of taking on himself the curse which hung over Israel and which on the one hand prevented her from enjoying full membership in Abraham’s family and thereby on the other hand prevented the blessing of Abraham from flowing out to the Gentiles. The Messiah has come here Israel is, under the Torah’s curse . . . , in order to be not only Israel’s representative but Israel’s redeeming representative” (Wright, Climax, 151). Christ not only suffered Israel’s exile, however, but in the eschatological reality of his resurrection (“a new creation”—2 Cor. 5:17), he has also returned from exile and thereby restored Israel (Ezekiel 37:1-14 depicts the return from exile as a resurrection from the dead). The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the inbreaking of the age to come and as such is the realization of God’s pure, unconditional hospitality—which is not infinitely delayed, forever “to come” (à venir). Thus, we can observe the objective pole of the atonement when we interpret the cross in the light of the open grave. Redemption is not simply the result of punishment, but is the result of a punishment that leads to the restoration and new life of the eschaton.

 

St. Paul’s difficulty with the Galatians is that they refuse to live in anticipation of this eschatological hospitality that has, at least in principle, already brought them the blessing of covenant renewal and so of God’s unconditional hospitality, the blessing of Abraham has now come to the Gentiles (Gal 3:14). The Judaizers’ wish to abide by the ethnic boundary markers of the Law means that they posit themselves under the old covenant and so put themselves back into a historical period that has proven to be a dead-end road. Life under the Law led to exile. By attempting to do “works of the Law,” therefore, the people of Galatia would place themselves in the sphere of the curse. “This curse-threat looms overhead like the sword of Damocles, ever ready to fall and realize its full maledictory potential upon those who stand beneath it. The state of its existence results from being ‘under the law’ for it is the torah which pronounces the threat of curse” (Joseph P. Braswell, “’The Blessing of Abraham’ verses ‘the Curse of the Law’: Another Look at Gal 3:10-13,” Westminster Theological Journal 53 [1991]: 76-77). (Hans Boersma, Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2004], 174-77)