Book Notice: Paul Barnett, Galatians: Defending the Truth

Paul Barnett

Galatians: Defending the Truth
Reading the Bible Today Series
Sydney: Aquila Press, 2012.
Available at CEP (with chapter preview).

Here’s the blurb for the book:

The Apostle Paul’s earliest surviving letter, Galatians gives its readers an insight into Paul’s life as a Pharisee and persecutor, and the change brought about through his amazing conversion. Paul Barnett’s enlightening commentary shows readers the apostle Paul’s defence of the truth he now held to at any cost, and his heartfelt desire to protect the Galatian church from false teachers who sought to impose the old law-driven perspective on new Christians, both Jew and Gentile.

In this slender but concise commentary, Paul Barnett proceeds to exposit Paul’s defence of the Gospel to the Galatians in light of the “troublers” who were seeking to impose law-observance on the Galatian Gentile believers. He dates Galatians to 48 AD before the Jerusalem council. Barnett points to the historical value of Galatians as a window into earliest Christianity, but also its theological utility. On Galatians, Luther, and the NPP, Barnett states: “The new perspective has usefully pointed out errors in Luther’s views about the law of God and also that he has rather anachronistically bracketed Paul’s opponents with his Roman Catholic opponents. Yet despite these shortcomings Luther’s insight about ‘grace alone’ and ‘by faith alone’ as applicable to individuals remaisn true to Paul’s teaching in the letter to the Galatians” (p. 19).

On the incident at Antioch, Barnett observes: “If Cephas withdrew from table fellowship in the common meal it would send the clear message to other Jews to follow him, but also told male Gentile believers that they must be circumcised to qualify as covenant brothers with whom Jewish believers could eat” (p. 66). On the allegory of Galatians 4, he comments: “Despite the complexity of Paul’s argument the essential message is clear. God’s blessing of the Gentile nations began with Abraham but it did not proceed to those nations via circumcision/Mt Sinai/the law/Jerusalem, as this was the way of spiritual slavery. Rather ‘freedom’ as the great of God’s blessings, always came via ‘promise’, first to Abraham and Sarah and then to their multitudinous ‘Isaac’-like descendents among the Gentiles whose lives had now been touched by the Holy Spirit” (p. 137). On the “Israel of God” in Gal 6:16, Barnett says, “the Israel of God is now re-defined as those who ‘belong to Christ.” Paul could not be more pointed” (p. 191). The volume concludes with a no holds barred critique of James Dunn’s Galatians commentary. Barnett indicts Dunn because “Nor is Dunn’s perspective ‘new’. At heart this version is man-centred, not God-centred and Christ-centred as Paul’s letter to the Galatians clearly is. In a word, Dunn’s is a semi-pelagian viewpoint, one that is not ‘new’, but one that was current in pre-Reformation Catholicism.” He even thinks that Dunn’s many students are reshaping Protestant thinking about Paul, creating a kind of “Protestant Counter-Reformation.” As much as I like Barnett’s Galatians commentary, I did find his parting salvo against Dunn rather harsh given what I know of Dunn and many of his former students! Especially since Dunn would see his work as complementary to rather than contrary to the best of the Reformed tradition.

Otherwise Barnett has produced a concise yet illuminating commentary on Galatians written from a robust Reformed perspective.