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- Herausgeber: IVP Formatio
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
We aspire to freedom but often resign ourselves to an existence trapped in uneasiness and dread. Is there any way to shed such heaviness and reignite hope for deliverance? In Traveling Light, Eugene H. Peterson urges us to listen to an expert on freedom, Paul, whose letter to the Galatians reminds us of the realities of life in Christ, freely given to all. Peterson says, "If there is a story of freedom to be told, the story must begin with God. . . . The Bible is not a script for a funeral service, but the record of the proclaimed and witnessed God bringing new life to the dead. Everywhere it is a story of resurrection—life where we expect death." That lightness of spirit we're shown in Scripture is a gift and challenge. With an open path forward, Peterson calls us to embrace change, exploration, trust, love, and much more. Now with a new study guide, share the work of pursuing real rescue and relief through the abiding wisdom of Peterson.
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FOREWORD BY KAREN SWALLOW PRIOR
Contents
TRAVELING LIGHTIS A WORK OF SPIRITUAL THEOLOGY. In an interview with poet Luci Shaw, Eugene Peterson explained that “spiritual theology,” as he calls it, “is simply theology lived.”1
In this book, Peterson ponders what a life lived—truly lived—in Christian liberty might look like. What it might feel like. What it might sound like. And what it might really be.
It would be—could be—is—glorious. Generative. Liberating. Light.
The picture Peterson paints of Christian liberty isn’t his own, but rather is an exploration (a fruitful, evocative one at that) of Paul’s letter to the Galatians, a book some call the Magna Carta of Christian liberty. “It was for freedom that Christ set us free,” Paul writes in Galatians 5:1. Peterson helps us count the ways (though they be infinite) in which freedom manifests itself in those who have been set free by Christ.
The life of freedom in Christ is more art than science, as Peterson shows. The science is clear, of course. We have the law of the Old Testament, captured by the Ten Commandments, and fulfilled, as Paul says in Galatians 5:14, “in one word, in the statement, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” In the previous verse, Paul reminds Christians that we have been called to freedom for a purpose: to serve one another through love.
The kind of love Paul is talking about is the fruit of the Spirit. Peterson’s reflections on this important passage from Galatians (5:22-23) present the culmination of all the freedoms he considers in this book. Of course, you need to read what he writes for yourself. But to whet your appetite, let me point you to what Peterson observes about love and self-control, the first and last of the nine elements that comprise the metaphor of fruit. Love, Peterson notes, “completes the Hebrew Torah.” And self-control “fulfills the Greek ideal.”
So, too, Christ.
Christ completes the Old Testament. And Christ came to earth, to a specific place and in a specific time wherein he joined two cultures, two traditions, two peoples—Greek and Jew. This is the particular union Paul helps the Galatians to make. In so doing, Paul helps us to understand how Christ overcomes the cultural barriers not only of that time but ours too.
Because cultures change—and with them the particular barriers each one places between us and others as well as between us and Christ—the art of living freely and traveling light in Christ must be cultivated afresh, just as fruit must be cultivated. As Peterson observes, the process of bearing fruit (natural or spiritual) is long, complex, and organic. It’s a process that requires care, attention, and intention. In this way, freedom in Christ is, among many other freedoms, the freedom to create.
Not all of us think of ourselves as creative. Yet, to be made in the image of God the Creator means we have a creative capacity. It means, too, that we have a God-given responsibility to steward and cultivate our creativity. And some of us need might need to realize that painting, sculpting, singing, dancing, and knitting aren’t the only ways to be creative. (It’s a good thing, too, because I can’t do any of these!)
Bearing the gift and burden of freedom well is itself a creative act for the believer. Like any artist, we must hold in tension the constraints of the form (Christ, the Word, and the law that requires us to love God and neighbor) with the freedom of expressiveness and individuality that come by virtue of being uniquely created by God.
Paul models this creativity for us. When he shares his testimony and establishes his authority with the Galatians, Peterson points out, “he doesn’t give us a formula; he tells his story.”
Paul’s story is unique, particular, and creative. The uncreative life, in contrast, is one “that proceeds along well-chartered, predictable lines—copying what others do, imitating stereotyped behavior, expressing itself in a few sentimentalities mass-produced from the cliché factories of popular culture,” Peterson writes. Freedom, on the other hand, allows us to “separate ourselves from what is expected, what is needed, what is possible. Creation is not copying, not filling an order, not meeting a need. It is risking oneself in the new.” Oh, how I need this reminder.
We all have different stories. Paul’s story is not anyone else’s story, and neither is yours or mine. Yet, all of our stories begin and end in Christ. We are all stories that Christ is writing. Has written. Better yet, we are his poems. Each of us is poem by Christ.
Peterson was a poet-theologian. By this I mean, of course, that he wrote poetry. But I also mean that he understood Christian doctrine with a fullness and play that reflect a Christ who liked to answer questions with better questions and to teach eternal truths through the puzzle of parables and the paradox of beatitudes.
One of Peterson’s favorite poets (and mine) was the nineteenth century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Peterson’s approach to freedom in Christ reflects what Hopkins expresses in his stunning and beautiful poem “The Windhover,” which, significantly, Hopkins dedicated in the poem’s epigraph, “To Christ our Lord.”
It is not the task of this little foreword to explicate a complex and masterful poem such as “The Windhover.” But I urge you to read it. Read it slowly. Read it again. Read it out loud. Read it some more. No one “travels light” more than the windhover.
I can point out, at the very least, that the poem is a sonnet. Its two parts (an octave followed by a sestet) develop first one idea that then points to the large one. The first idea is the image of this magnificent bird—first hovering with exquisite control, like a skilled horseman reining in in his steed, then taking off like a skater who glides through sky like its ice. This glorious sight points the poet to Christ, who is, the poet says, his own chevalier (or knight), a warrior whose wound (the “gash” in the last line) brings forth blood that is not merely red (and mortal) but gold (and eternal). Finally, the key word of the poem—“buckle”—brings us back to a theme addressed above. “Buckle” suggests a number of related things: a fastening, a collapse, a bringing together, an integration of all things—in other words, a crux, or cross, like that on which Christ bought our freedom forever.
I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, — the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.2
Christian theology lived is indeed, as Peterson says, “a dancing, leaping, daring life.” These pages will show you the way.
If you stick with this, living out what I tell you, you are my disciples for sure. Then you will experience for yourselves the truth, and the truth will free you. . . . So if the Son sets you free, you are free through and through.
JOHN 8:31-32, 36
We join our prayers today in intercession for men and women in our society who are trapped:
those who are trapped in poverty with no sign of relief;
those who are trapped in jobs that engage but a fraction of their powers;
those who are trapped in families where love has ebbed away;
those who are trapped in unwanted alliances out of which they cannot break;
those who are trapped by the fear of discovery, or by dependency on others; or by the need for drugs, or by an addiction to alcohol.
O Thou whose will it is that we be free, and who didst give Thy Son that we might be delivered from all coercive powers;
make us examples of Thy freedom, proclaimers of Thy freedom, and instruments of Thy freedom;
snap our chains that we may loose the chains of others.
Then shall the joy of the liberated rise from the earth like a mighty hymn of praise, Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
ERNEST T. CAMPBELL
WE LIVE IN A WORLD AWASH IN FANTASIES of freedom. We spend enormous sums of money and immense amounts of psychic energy on these fantasies. We fantasize a free life based variously on power, on sex, on fame, on leisure. Whole industries develop out of these fantasies. Careers are shaped by them. Political movements are launched and fueled by them. But the world we live in is conspicuously and sadly lacking in the experience of freedom. The fantasies are barren: they give birth to nothing in word or deed. For all our elaborate and expensive fantasies, the actual lives that most people live are filled with impotence, boredom, obscurity, and hassle.
Living in the land of the free has not made us free; we are a nation of addicts and complainers. Being provided with freedom of religion has not made us free; coercive cults and enslaving superstitions continue to proliferate.
Assembling with people in church and listening to ringing proclamations of freedom—“He whom the Son sets free is free indeed!”—has not made us free. Our churches are attended regularly by the inhibited, the obsessive-compulsive, the fearfully defensive—enough of them to provide outside observers with a stereotype.
But not everything that has to do with freedom is fantasy. There are also realities of freedom. They are not, perhaps, as conspicuous, but they are there, at least for people of faith. These people believe that God is free. He created the world and the people in it freely and not out of necessity. Since a free God is at the center of all existence, and all creation and every creature issues from a free act, freedom and not necessity is always the deeper and more lasting reality. At the center of that belief is the story of Jesus, the freest person who ever lived. And there is recurrent witness of the Spirit who is free, like the wind that “blows where it wills.” In every culture and land there is abundant testimony that persons who trust in God participate in this freedom. My own experience supports the testimony: when I live in faith I live freely. When I set God at the center of my life, I realize vast freedoms and surprising spontaneities. When I center life in my own will, my freedom diminishes markedly. I live constricted and anxious.
I live in a vortex where these fantasies and realities mingle. The life I live in the world cannot escape the fantasies, but neither can it avoid the realities. Like so many others who have chosen to live by faith, I find that it is a daily task to discriminate between the fantasies and the realities. And I need all the help I can get.
TRUTH IN NEED OF FOCUS
There are moments when a single truth seems to cry out for focused proclamation. For me one of these moments came in the early 1980s; freedom in Christ seemed the truth in need of focus. The end of a millennium was in sight. It would soon be two thousand years since Christ lived and died and rose again. The world had seen a succession of political and social revolutions that had featured the word freedom. Especially in the Western world, but hardly confined there, aspirations to freedom were very strong. But when I looked at the people I was living with as pastor—fairly affluent, well educated, somewhat knowledgeable about the Christian faith—I realized how unfree they were. They were buying expensive security systems to protect their possessions from burglary. They were overcome with anxieties in the face of rising inflation. They were pessimistic about the prospects for justice and peace in a world bristling with sophisticated weapons systems and nuclear devices. They were living huddled, worried, defensive lives. I wanted to shout in objection: Don’t live that way! You are Christians! Our lives can be a growth into freedom instead of a withdrawal into anxious wariness. Instead of shouting I returned to my regular round of work—preaching and teaching, visiting and counseling, praying and writing, encouraging and directing—but I was determined to seek ways in which I could awaken a hunger and thirst for the free life among people who had lost an appetite for it, and then, having awakened the appetite, to find the food and drink that would satisfy it. The more I did this, the more I became convinced that the experience of freedom in the life of faith is at the very heart of what it means to be human.
No truth is ever out of date, and none should be promoted at the expense of the whole truth, but there are occasions when particular truths must be emphasized. Is this such a time? Just as the fourth century required an emphasis on the deity of Christ, and the sixteenth century an emphasis on justification by faith, perhaps these last years of the twentieth century need an emphasis on the freedom that comes to maturity in a life of faith in Christ. Maybe living out this Christ-freedom is a gift we can offer the world as it passes its millennial milestone. So that is what I set myself to do.
SLOGANS AND CANT
In the process of doing this work I encountered difficulties. For instance, there was the matter of terminology. The word freedom, once a vessel light and swift, has become barnacle-encrusted with slogans and cant, sluggish in the waters of discourse, unresponsive to nuance or insight. For centuries philosophers and theologians and poets kept the word clean in the service of truth. But in recent decades it has been appropriated by people who want to sell ideas and things for a profit, quite apart from any interest in truth.
Political propagandists and advertising copywriters have a monopoly on the word. If someone wants to use it to say something carefully and truly about persons or God, who has ears to hear? The word is immensely attractive and awakens such deep longings in us that it is no wonder that those who want us to buy their goods or enlist in their projects make promises of freedom.
The word freedom is used with deliberate cynicism by many to disguise operations that are enslaving. It is also used carelessly and thoughtlessly by others so that it has long since lost connection with truths that root experience in reality. Shouting the word freedom does nothing to bring about its reality. Labeling thoughts or actions as free does not alter their actual nature. Freedom is not an abstraction, and it is not a thing. It is a gift and a skill. It is a gift that another provides; it is a skill that must be exercised by each person within the learned limits of reality. If we would understand freedom, we must be taught; if we would acquire freedom, we must be trained.
HELP FROM A SPECIALIST
I found my best help in doing this in St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians. Among the writers of Scripture, Paul is the specialist in matters of freedom. This can be seen in the frequency of Greek words for freedom found in Paul’s letters (28 instances) in comparison with the rest of the New Testament (8) and the Apostolic Fathers (6). And in Paul’s writings the words for freedom occur more frequently in his letter to the Galatians (10 times) than in any other letter (7 times in Romans; 7 times in 1 Corinthians).
Through the Christian centuries this letter has often been used by God to restore vigor and passion to the life of faith and to confront the world with the realities of a free life in Christ, a life that is free for all: given freely to all of us, making all who receive it free; enabling us to live freely in relation to God and all others. The truth of the Galatian text is documented in the lives of free persons. It is possible. The experience is valid. We are not in realms of fantasy. We are not reduced to necessity. Free in Christ, we are free for all.
So I set myself deliberately between Paul’s words in Galatians and the words of the people I lived with in church and in the world. I tried to listen in both directions and let the words interact with each other. I pondered and I prayed. I taught and I preached. I encouraged and I directed. I attempted to keep both elements in tension in my imagination and in my ministry—the element of Galatians, churning and surging with the energy of freedom, and the element of people who have given up on freedom and who live apathetically or fatalistically.
I wanted to stay immersed in the complexities of a full life, to accept all the necessities of a responsible life, and still to live freely. This book is an interim report on the continuing work of training and being trained in a way of life developed at God’s initiative and in relation to his freedom. It is not biblical exposition or commentary in any classic sense; it is more like prayer—a continuing conversation that searches after understanding, sometimes digressing, but returning again and again to the word of God in the text to listen, to reflect, to answer, and to learn.
The development has not been orderly. Sometimes I am puzzled by Paul, sometimes exasperated by people, sometimes dismayed at my own slowness of heart to believe. I am put in numerous situations, both personal and pastoral, in which I feel there is little or no freedom. There are other times when I am with people who, even while they experience the entrapments that life springs on them, still go their way with a light step and graceful mien. Every time this happens it is a marvel. Together, over a period of years, we experience the detailed rightness of what it means to live as free persons, traveling light.
Some things became clear very early. For one thing, all the rah-rah formulas of freedom that our society spawns are nonsense. They are either simplistic, escape-hatch freedoms from responsibility or vulgar, manipulative freedoms to exploit others. Many people have tried one or more of them, found them unworkable or immoral, and, hearing of no other freedom, succumbed to “lives of quiet desperation.”1
It also became clear that there are no absolute freedoms. Absolute freedoms are fantasy freedoms. They deny God and they ignore creation, using only the ego as a base for freedom. They brook no qualification, no limitation, no compromise, no relationship. They do not grow out of wise and artful dealing with the human condition, but rather, severed from the actual, they float colorfully and aimlessly in the air like helium-filled party balloons. “The first condition of freedom,” say Will and Ariel Durant, “is its limitation; make it absolute and it dies in chaos.”2
PIONEERS OF THE FREE SPIRIT
I, for one, do not underestimate the difficulties in living free for all, of traveling light: it is persistently hard. Nor can I do it on my own: I need Christ and a community of faith. But there is nothing more worthwhile doing. Many Christians today have to all appearances ceased to be what Jacques Ellul calls “unconscious revolutionaries.”3It is necessary to rouse awareness, to waken the spirit, because freedom is essential if all would be truly human. I am convinced that people settle for far too little in matters of freedom. Christians, in touch with the God who grants us a freedom far richer than its political and cultural versions, are in the privileged but awesomely responsible position of pioneers of the free spirit, the free life. Nicolas Berdyaev insists: “God has laid upon man the duty of being free, of safeguarding freedom of spirit, no matter how difficult that may be, or how much sacrifice and suffering it may require.”4
To discover movements of freedom in oneself where there has been only fear-ridden and cowering subjection; to stimulate a free word or act in persons submerged in apathy or pessimism, sluggishly living out their days with diminishing expectations and dwindling energy—these are gloriously worth doing.
I, Paul, and my companions in faith here, send greetings to the Galatians churches. My authority for writing to you does not come from any popular vote of the people, nor does it come through the appointment of some human higher-up. It comes directly from Jesus the Messiah and God the Father, who raised him from the dead. I’m God-commissioned. So I greet you with the great words, grace and peace! We know the meaning of those words because Jesus Christ rescued us from this evil world we’re in by offering himself as a sacrifice for our sins. God’s plan is that we all experience that rescue. Glory to God forever! Oh, yes!
GALATIANS 1:1-5
AWEALTHY TEXAN WAS BEING BURIED IN STYLE. According to the instructions written in his will, he was propped behind the wheel of his solid gold Cadillac. The car was poised before a large grave excavated in the prairie. On signal, the brakes were released and the lavish automobile, with its erstwhile owner, rolled gently down the incline into the grave. As it drifted to a stop and the dust settled, one spectator said in awe, “Man, that’s livin’!”
A rather poor joke, but a telling parable. The punch line is repeated—with no sense of irony, no awareness of jest—frequently, far too frequently, in everyday life. In 1978 all my friends were telling me that I simply must see the museum exhibit of the treasures of King Tutankhamen. Everyone was going. Long lines of people were crowding their way to see the splendid display. I fully intended to join them but was prevented. I had to depend on reports and photographs. What I remember most about the reports were sophisticated variations on the phrase “Man, that’s livin’!” It dawned on me one day that people were talking about a corpse and a tomb. The gold was so alive, my friends said. The jewelry communicated such a sense of vitality. Then another contrast took shape in my imagination: between that treasure-packed Egyptian tomb and an empty tomb in Palestine. And I thought about how the source of life for persons, who, now and for centuries past, have crowded weekly into churches all over the world, came from the empty tomb from which no jewelry, no artifacts and no corpse had been recovered. Out of that emptiness poured the freedom to live.
A STORY OF LIFE AND DEATH
On the first page of the Bible we read that God creates life; two pages later man and woman choose death. History narrates the antiphony between God’s will to life and the human will to death.
The word life, in the Bible and in all deeply imagined literature, means far more than biological existence. The word death, likewise, means far more than the termination of biological function. Each word is rich in both literal and metaphorical nuance. Using the words in these deep and penetrating ways, the Bible tells the story of the life of God and of the death of persons.
Keen observers of the human condition support the biblical declaration that in all the essentials that have to do with its created being, the human is dead. The testimony is well documented in all cultures across many centuries. Whether these observers believe in God or not, they can see that there is something ultimately wrong with the condition in which persons find themselves. Genesis reports God’s saying of the tree, “Don’t eat from it; don’t even touch it or you’ll die” (Gen 3:3).
The fruit was eaten. The story continues, but insofar as it is a story about men and women and not of God, it is a story of death. In our day Samuel Beckett, who does not believe in God, accepts God’s description of the human condition, witnessing in curt despair, “Man is a terminal illness.”1
Genesis and Beckett are strange bedfellows, but bedfellows nonetheless. The ancient Hebrew theologian and the modern Irish dramatist agree: if there is a story of persons to be told, it is a story of death. “The moment you eat from that tree, you’re dead” (Gen 2:17); “man is a terminal illness” (Beckett).
So when Paul refers to persons as dead through trespasses and sins (Eph 2:1), he can in no way be supposed to be mordantly eccentric; he expresses the assured results of what was realized by the ancients and has been confirmed by the moderns. And when he passionately cries out, “I’ve tried everything and nothing helps. I’m at the end of my rope. Is there no one who can do anything for me?” (Rom 7:24), he cannot be accused of hysterical melodrama—his anguish is common to all who have honestly confronted the human condition. The pre-Christian sage (the author of Genesis), the Christian convert (Paul) and the post-Christian nihilist (Beckett) agree in this at least: the story of humanity is a story of death.
The story of freedom then cannot begin with an analysis of humankind, with a search into the cell or the soul or the mind. Freedom cannot be discovered in a corpse, no matter how close or sympathetic the study, no matter how technically sophisticated the instruments of examination. The most honest and searching examinations of freedom that begin with the human conclude, rightly, that there is no freedom. There is only economic determinism (Marx), or biological determinism (Freud), or psychological determinism (B. F. Skinner), or philosophical nihilism (Nietzsche). If there is a story of freedom to be told, the story must begin with God. That is what the biblical story does. It does not sentimentally describe a corpse, but vigorously proclaims the God of life. The Bible is not a script for a funeral service, but the record of the proclaimed and witnessed God bringing new life to the dead. Everywhere it is a story of resurrection-life where we expect death. Because of God’s word and act, and only because of God’s word and act, persons are free to live. But if we begin with the human, there can be no story of freedom, only the analysis of a decaying cadaver. It is no surprise, then, to find that Paul begins his reveille on freedom by trumpeting God’s initiating action.
I, Paul, and my companions in faith here, send greetings to the Galatians churches. My authority for writing to you does not come from any popular vote of the people, nor does it come through the appointment of some human higher-up. It comes directly from Jesus the Messiah and God the Father, who raised him from the dead. I’m God-commissioned. So I greet you with the great words, grace and peace! We know the meaning of those words because Jesus Christ rescued us from this evil world we’re in by offering himself as a sacrifice for our sins. God’s plan is that we all experience that rescue. Glory to God forever! Oh, yes! (Gal 1:1-5)
THE STORY OF FREEDOM
In the story of freedom, God is always the subject; the human, always the object. If men and women are to live free, it will be because of God’s actions, not because of our own will or disposition or politics or intelligence. Three paradigmatic instances in Paul’s opening lines show God to be subject and the human to be object. Paul is made an apostle by God. Jesus is raised from the dead by God. We are rescued from the present evil age by God. Something is done to us or for us before we do anything. We are acted on before we act. Life is not natural to us; it is supernaturally provided for us. Human freedom to live results from God-initiated resurrection.
No one is born free. Our common human experience prepares us to receive this revealed truth; for when we leave the warm security of the womb, we are immediately embraced in protecting and nurturing arms. If we were set free then, we would merely die. Hunger and thirst, weather and disease, accidents and animals would make short work of us if we were set free. An infant is not born into freedom, but into a network of security and care. If the infant is carefree it is because of the constant attendance of many who are careful. We begin our lives in an intricate arrangement of constraints, limits, boundaries and restrictions. No one counts that bad. Everyone, in fact, agrees that it is good. But it is not free. If we have nostalgic longings for those years of golden innocence, they are longings not for freedom but for security. We are, if we are fortunate, born secure; we are not born free. We are, however, born with a destiny to freedom and a capacity for freedom which are realized in a life of faith.
Freedom, if we get it, is a deliverance. Every person’s growth from infancy through childhood and adolescence to adulthood shows the complexity of the process. Freedom is the result of years of learning, of negotiation, of trial and error, of accident and healing, of venture and failure. It involves the lives of many—not only the person but parents, not only peers but superiors. We cannot be free naturally and on our own; freedom requires permissions, demands, struggles, sufferings, risks.
If freedom were natural, it would be inevitable. But it is not inevitable. Not all lives are free. Many persons do not experience freedom at all as they go from childhood to adulthood; they only exchange determinisms. Dependency on a parent is exchanged for dependency on a spouse. Addiction to the breast is exchanged for addiction to alcohol or drugs. The fear of parental authority is exchanged for the fear of peer disapproval. Anxiety over losing the securities of the familiar is exchanged for anxieties that provoke paralysis in face of any change or danger. Spontaneities never occur. Motives never develop. Dreams are never accepted; challenges, never met.
Also, if freedom were natural, it would show itself as the product of a smoothly developing process, the natural unfolding of bud to blossom, instead of what it is, in fact, a victorious prize in pitched battle. Our freedom to live does not come out of quiet Sunday afternoon reveries in meadows fragrant with rose of Sharon and Easter lily, but out of the dark, dramatic agonies marked by Lucifer’s plunge from the heights and war in heaven, cries for crucifixion and the dread “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” The story of freedom is like that of the earth’s crust. Exposed cross sections of the earth tell of volcanic eruptions, violent earthquakes, devastating droughts and ravaging floods, intermixed with strata showing stretches of quietness and mild calm. Signs of ice-age austerities alternate with evidence of tropical lushness. The present free moment in any person’s life is not a natural accumulation of goodness, but a paragraph in a history of conflict comprising alienation and reconciliation, advance and retreat, war and peace. The verbs of freedom are made, raised, rescued. And God is the subject of each of them.
THIS PRESENT EVIL AGE
Paul describes the course of the world apart from Christ as “this present evil age.” Any people who attempt to live in defiance of God—and every age makes the attempt—lives badly. Sin destroys our capacity to live. It weakens our vitality. It blinds us to truth. It incapacitates us for living out a healthy love and a vigorous peace. We need deliverance from it. God provides deliverance from it, decade after decade, generation after generation, “according to the will of our God and Father.” That is the promise of the gospel. That is the experience of the Christian. That is the theme of the Galatian letter.
“This present evil age.” We are born into a world that shows everywhere the signs of some great primordial catastrophe. There are vast beauties and breathtaking virtues in this present age, but nothing pristine. The sign of our birth is a scar. The world into which we are born is dangerous. The parents to whom we are born are flawed. The governments under which we are reared are corrupt. Are we free to live? Or are we only allowed a meager energy and a compromised space to cope?
Sin is the fact of separation from God’s presence and purposes, experienced variously as restriction, limitation, inadequacy and weakness. Every interruption of the will or impulse or desire interferes with freedom. And the interruptions are endless. Life lived under these conditions cannot be called free, even though there will always be unforced and spontaneous moments that preserve a sense of the possibilities of freedom. Sensitive and thoughtful persons are often acutely aware of enslavement. Paul’s explosive “Is there no one who can do anything for me?” (Rom 7:24) is archetypal.
It is God’s will “to deliver us from the present evil age.”
Freedom begins here at the point of rescue. Martin Luther found the entire epistle compressed into this phrase.2 Christ’s death and resurrection constitute a rescue from the enslavement to “this present evil age” in which there is no access to the future, to relationships, to God. The key word deliver (exaireo) “denotes not a removal from, but a rescue from the power of.”3 The emphasis of the word is upon the act of rescue.
The word must be read closely here, and in context. The rescue is not from the world, and not from limitations or boundaries, but from sin, that which separates us from God and his purposed creation and destined redemption.
And the rescue is God’s work. Nothing else will do for a beginning. If there is no rescue from sin, there is no point in talking about freedom at all.
The Christian memory is well stocked with recollections of this deliverance. Early Christian preaching rehearsed the evidence. Stephen, in his famous sermon, remembered Joseph, sold into Egypt “God was right there with him, though—he not only rescued [exaireo] him from all his troubles but brought him to the attention of Pharaoh, king of Egypt. He was so impressed with Joseph that he put him in charge of the whole country” (Acts 7:9-10). Now Joseph was a man who, participating in the will of God for deliverance, multiplied the consequences of deliverance and spread them out over an entire generation. He made a difference. Remembering the Joseph story, we realize that no pit or prison is inaccessible to the freeing, delivering, rescuing power of God, and that freedom, once established even in one person, extends itself into political and social relationships and cultural movements.
Over a thousand years later, in the early days of the church, King Herod “got it into his head to go after some of the church members” (Acts 12:1). He killed James and put Peter, the leader of the small Christian band, in prison. Herod found that his action pleased many. He was a man who made decisions on the grounds of what would get him the most applause, a not uncommon characteristic in so-called leaders.
That would put a stop to the hymn-singing Christians! That would show the people where the center of power was. That would show these people who prattled about freedom the tough realities of the world. But in the middle of the night Peter was delivered from the prison. Out in the street Peter said, “The Master sent his angel and rescued [exaireo] me from Herod’s vicious little production and the spectacle the Jewish mob was looking forward to” (Acts 12:11).
What were the people expecting? The people were expecting the extermination of this one bright hope. The people were expecting that Roman power would crush anyone that stepped out of line. The people were expecting more oppression and more taxes. They didn’t believe that there was freedom to believe and sing. They didn’t believe that God could change things. They didn’t believe that a life of faith could make a difference. And so they grimly and joylessly allied themselves with the forces of society, the culture, the age. They concluded that there was no use going against the grain of “this present evil age,” and so they supported Herod over Peter. But Peter was set free, and shortly afterward Herod was a diseased corpse (Acts 12:23).
Paul’s word delivered (exaireo) is not rhetoric, not propaganda, nor cheerleading. It is history: documented deliverance.
THE FREE SPIRIT
The rescue was not only remembered; it was personally experienced. F. F. Bruce describes Paul as the “apostle of the free spirit.”4 Paul himself experienced what he preached and taught and wrote. Three phrases in the opening paragraph of Galatians are windows into Paul’s experience of rescue which launched him into a life of freedom. First, he says: “I am God-commissioned . . .” Some translations use the word apostle
