9/30/06 One well-worn path through these thickets has been made by those who insist that the agitators are legalists: proto-Pelagians who are trying to persuade the Galatians to seek justification by performing good moral deeds.  Among the many problems this view faces … (exactly how Nizpom was approaching it)

The question at issue was not, How can individual sinners find salvation? but rather, Are Christian Jews bound, by the Jewish kosher laws, to eat separately from Christian Gentiles, or are they bound by the gospel to eat at the same table with them? 

What, then, does Paul’s ‘ethics,’ if we should call it that, have to do with the fundamental thrust of the letter as a whole? (a question that occurred to when listening to a recent Galatians  sermon, which was somewhat isolated moralisms, though he did mention Jesus and the Spirit..)

http://www.ntwrightpage.com/Wright_Galatians_Exegesis_Theology.htm

The ‘ethics’ is not an isolated, tacked on ‘how to behave once you are saved.’

‘Paul articulated, in other words, a way of being human which he saw as the true way.’ (What St. Paul Really Said, p. 136)

10/2/06 N.T. Wright: ‘[Paul] did not have to make the Jewish message into an essentially Gentile message for it to be audible or comprehensible to his pagan hearers … What the Gentiles needed was precisely the Jewish message, or rather the Jewish message as fulfilled in Jesus the Messiah.  (What St. Paul Really Said).

Listening to an R.C. Sproul sermon, he is wringing his hands about the New Perspective as ‘an attack on the Gospel.’

‘The message … had to remain essentially Jewish if it was to have its proper relevance to the pagans … [otherwise] it would have made YHWH one God among the other gods. By remaining what it was, it claimed the high ground of genuine creational monotheism.’ (N.T. Wright)

I went to MacMenamins and had a beer, while reading the article The Letter to the Galatians: Exegesis and Theology by N.T. Wright (reading this makes me realize how vacuous the recent series was).