Transcript
GILLESPIE: You need to know that Californians take a lot of grief around this place during the course of the year, probably because there are so many of them. Of all the states in the United States, we have more students from California than any other state except Pennsylvania. And partly because they're so obnoxious. We had one distinguished guest come and explain California like this. He said,
"Think of us -- a map of the United States. This is the Atlantic and this is the Pacific." He said, "Well, someone just turned it like this and everything loose fell into California." But one of our California students, not to be outdone, rose and said, "Sir, do you realize that if the Pilgrims had landed in California, the rest of this great land would still
be unexplored?" What really matters is not where we're from and not from where we serve. It doesn't matter what our denomination is. It doesn't matter what seminary we graduated from -- although, we all enjoy
focusing our lives upon each one of those things and finding our lives in the context of those things. What matters is the gospel. I made a strong pitch last Monday night in favor of focusing ministry on the preaching of the gospel. But of course, I never said one word about what that gospel is. These four days, these four mornings,
we will be focusing on that New Testament book, which deals with the crisis of the gospel, which speaks to a situation in which the gospel I sat risk, and which, perhaps, more than any other of the New Testament books, focuses the gospel upon that essential center of God's redeeming grace in Jesus Christ than any other.
The theme of these four presentations is truth for the journey. We have been on the journey theme this week -- last week and this. One of the great crises in the ministry today is the fact that we, the ministers, tended to lose our grip, our confidence,
a grip on and our confidence in the truth of the gospel. Most of us are infinitely more adept at explaining to people what it is we don't believe than we are at clearly stating what it is we do believe. And I mean believe to the point of putting our lives on the line and our faith to the test.
Now, that's not because we're bad folks; it is because we live and work and have been raised in a society which itself has lost its confidence in the truth. Or at least in our ability -- our human ability -- to know the truth and to state the truth. That's what Allan Bloom's book, The Closing of the American Mind, is all about.
Allan Bloom's book has been faulted by every conceivable reviewer. Some of them are absolutely outraged by it, which [always can say to you?] and to me that there's something important here. And what Bloom is bemoaning is not the passing of the age of faith or the age of religion, he's bemoaning the passing of the age of reason. Bloom is an old-fashioned
rationalist. He's Jewish -- ethnically Jewish; I don't believe religiously Jewish -- but he's an old-fashioned rationalist. His heroes are Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and Descartes and Locke and Hume and Kant and on and on. And these are the minds, he says, the minds of the great Enlightenment which have shaped American culture. Of course, he conveniently forgets the whole Puritan side of the equation of the American experiment, but it's this rationalist side
that has created our great democracy. And that is now being undermined by the undermining of our confidence in reason itself. And he points to Nietzsche, who everybody thought was a little odd, but Nietzsche had his revenge because his basic ideas received wide currency through the writings of Sigmund Freud, on the one hand, and the writings of Max Weber on the other. And so, psychologically and sociologically, the confidence
in reason has been undermined and the only truth that college students, according to Bloom, have any confidence in is the truth that all truth is relative. So we live in a world where no one wants to say, "This is the truth," or bear witness to the truth or to make truth plain. And it is precisely the truth of the gospel that is at stake in
the letter to the Galatians. Paul uses that phrase twice, both in the second chapter -- chapter two, verse 10 and chapter -- I'm sorry, chapter one, verse 14 and chapter -- no, chapter two, verse 10 and chapter two, verse 14. On the one hand, he uses the phrase in the context of the truth of the gospel under theological discussion. The truth
is something you know and something you can state and something you can debate. And on the other hand, he uses it in the context of the crisis in the Church of Antioch, where the Jews had withdrawn from the [Table Fellowship?] with the Gentiles and Peter had to withdraw with them. And even Barnabas had been carried away. And Paul [said that they?] were not [walking?] according to the truth of the gospel.
Which is to say that the truth of the gospel is not only something you think and something you can state and something you can debate and argue, but the truth of the gospel is something you do. The truth of the gospel is a way of living as well as a way of thinking, but the two are related. The two are related. And that's what we wish to focus on these four mornings. What is the truth of the gospel, at least as attested by
Paul in his letter to the Galatians. Now, before beginning the letter itself, I want to say just a word about hermeneutics. That's the new in word. Well, it's not so new, but it's the in word. From the Greek noun [hermenea?], meaning interpretation. Hermeneutics is the philosophy of understanding,
the philosophy of interpretation. What is it that we're doing when we interpret Scripture? And I think we all need to have some understanding of what it is we're doing in order that we may have some understanding of what we're reading. Very briefly, I want to just lay before you a brief outline that, hopefully, you will find helpful because I have found it helpful in my own work. When you read the various books on hermeneutics
today, you find the word "meaning" used in a great variety of ways and that becomes confusing. What do we mean by the word "meaning"? Now, isn't that precisely the kind of a question you would expect to be raised in a theological seminary? I mean, people having nothing better to do with their time than to ask about the meaning of "meaning." But what
do we mean by the meaning of a text? You've all been trained to [exegete?] text, prepare sermons that have some kissing-cousin relationship with text, hopefully preach from text. But what do we mean by
the meaning of the text? Well, you can get into the impressionistic school, which is very popular in [creolistic?] circles. The text means whatever it mean to me. I just open the Scriptures and God speaks to me. And I don't -- I really don't want to put that down because I've done that enough myself and I know that there is truth in that, that God does speak to us as we read the Scriptures meditatively.
I also know there's great danger in that, that Scripture can take on some very strange meanings, depending upon what my needs at a moment might be. So that's good for devotional exercises, but we ought to have some safeguard against that intuitive draft of the text, based upon our particular situation in life. I want to suggest to you that there are three dimensions to the meaning of a text.
In one sense of the word, it's difficult for us to separate these out because they all seem to happening at the same time. And yet, for those of us who work with text and who prepare sermons from texts, we ought to at least be able to describe or identify these three dimensions or these three aspects of the meaning of a text. The first is what Paul Ricoeur calls the sense of the text. The S-E-N-S-E, the sense
of the text. Ricoeur calls this the what of the text. What the text says. Then, the -- secondly, there is the reference of the text. The reference of the text. This is the about what of the text. What is the text
talking about? What is the subject matter? What is the reality that it is bringing to expression in language? And that can be virtually anything, from an abstract concept to a historical event to God. The text is about something. And finally, the significance of the text. The significance of the text. You've had the
what of text, and the about what of the text, and then we come to the so what of the text. The text itself may suggest its own application. That is to say, in Paul's Letter to the Galatians, he certainly intended it to have a specific significance. He intended this letter to be translated out into action, into behavior, into a change
of attitude and practice in the life of the Galatian congregations. This was -- it had an intended application. So these are the three dimensions of meaning: the sense of the text, the reference of the text, and the significance of the text. And significance has to do with application. Now, how do we make sense in a text? I mean, how do we, in writing, make sense? Well, first of all,
we make sense through the sentence. The sentence is the basic unit of sensible communication. The sentence is the basic unit of human communication. And we construct a sentence on the basis of the grammar of the language that we use. So grammatical concerns help us to understand the sense of a sentence.
The problem is, of course, is that we don't just ejaculate sentences in writing a letter, in writing a sermon, in preparing even an article for the church newspaper. We write a whole and it's supposed to hang together. It's supposed to move from beginning through meat and potatoes to the crescendo at the end, so that there is the work as a whole -- a literary work, if you will -- when you read the
Gospel according to Mark, you're reading a literally whole, not just a verse by verse description of activities in the life of Jesus. Mark's whole gospel is a literary whole and we make sense by using a particular genre for expressing the sense we know. A parable is a genre.
Jesus told parables in order to score His point, in order to open up the understanding of His (inaudible). Mark uses and introduces, as far as we know, the gospel genre in the Christian literature. There really is nothing quite like it in all of ancient literature. Many attempts have been made, even some very recently, to identify the gospel genre with a form of ancient biography. But
all of these break down. The gospel genre, as far as we know, is still a unique literary genre created by the Christian church in order to proclaim its message. And in order to understand what is being said in a gospel, you need to be aware of what a gospel genre is and what it isn't. More mischief is caused in interpretation of text because of a mistaken guess about genre than any other reason.
Consider all the fuss about the first three chapters of Genesis in the last century. Did it happen? Didn't it happen? Is it true? Is it not true? Did it happen this way? Did it not happen that way? The real question is what is the genre. It's not the question of did it -- is it true, but in what sense is it true? In what sense is it true. So knowing the genre is very important. And then, another
factor is the style of the author and so on. But these are the three basic ways by which we make our -- by which we, as an author, make sense in writing something. We use sentences, we put sentences together into a literary whole, and we cast the whole in the form of some literary genre: a sermon, a narrative sermon, a you name it. And it's important to understand that genre in order
to make sense out of the text. Now, coming at it from our side -- coming at it from our side, here is the author seeking to express meaning through the text. And that meaning comes to expression in the three ways I've suggested: through the sense of the text, through the reference of the text -- the about what -- and then in the significance of the text. And here we are, the reader, the interpreter, coming at the text from our side.
This is the understanding side of the process. The author has understanding which the author is seeking to express through the text and here we are, the reader, coming at it with our own understanding, by the way, already in place, already at work, and none of us can escape that. They're called our [form for-schtat-ness?], our pre-understandings about the text and about the subject matter of the text. And we bring that with us and we're trying now to match up what we're doing with what the author's doing.
So the first step, it seems to me, in coming to terms with a biblical text, let's say, is to seek to comprehend the sense of the text. Comprehend the sense of the text. Now, at this point, no one is asking you whether you agree with what you're reading, whether you disagree with what you're reading, whether you think it's important, whether you think it's trivial. None of that is relevant
at this point. At this point, you simply discipline your mind, literally, to stand under the author. To stand under the author and let the author have his say. Now, many of us are not good listeners. I meet a lot of people and it's very interesting
for me to note how few of them are good listeners. And I notice that we ministers -- maybe it's because we're dancing around on a hot plate most of the time -- have a very difficult time really listening to somebody. While we're listening, we're looking beyond to see who else might be -- come in or who else might want our attention. You can always tell who really wants to talk to you and who really doesn't. We're not good listeners. But to be
an exegete of Scripture, you must become a good listener. And you must not interrupt too soon to get your words in and to get your thoughts. You don't want to get into the "yes, but" too early in the game. Just shut up and listen. Let the text have its say. And of course, we all know what that means. That means we
have to put the sentence in the context of the paragraph, the paragraph in the context of the letter, and so forth. And that's all very important because that's how the sense of the text is created. But just let the text have its say. Identify from what is said, then, what it's about. And for us, of course, as ministers of the gospel, the most important reference of the text is the theological reference; the Bible is about God.
The Bible is about Jesus Christ. The Bible is about the Spirit of God at work in the lives of human beings. And that theological reference of the text is so important for us. In fact, it's absolutely crucial for us. What does the text say about God? Not God in isolation, because you don't meet that God in Scripture. The God you meet in Scripture is always the God who is in relationship to human beings, seeing to establish a relationship,
seeking to live in covenant with us, seeking to redeem us from our sins, seeking to empower us [for?] ministry and so on and so forth. So it's always God in relation, but focus on the reference of the text. Now, here is a point you need to be very, very careful. Here is the point at which you must say to yourself, "I know something about this already." A few of us come to the Bible
with a tabula rasa. We already bring to our reading of the Bible -- even when we were in seminary. You know, this is the great struggle of seminary. People say -- people think that people get their theologies in seminary; it ain't so. People come to seminary with their theology and we have three years to break that open and do something with it. [It's a many?] people come to seminary simply to go through the hoop and
prove to their classes or their Presbyteria [their conference that they're now?] kosher and then got on with it. But many of our students really believe they already know enough, they just want to get out and do ministry. So we all bring to the task a biblical interpretation, our understanding which now, of course, is the product of many years of experience and many years of study. And that is not to be sneezed at. That is to be recognized and honored for what it is.
You already know maybe a good bit about what the text is about, about the subject matter. And now, you're going to enter into a conversation with the author which may, on the one hand, enlighten you. What the author says about the subject matter may simply be something you can add on to what you already know. Or it may be something [they're?] trying to cause
some adjustments in your thinking about the subject matter. Or it may be so radical that it's going to cause a complete reorganization of your thinking about the subject matter. And this is the point where it's very difficult, for most of us, to be open to the text. Most of us have a tendency to foreclose on the text before it can really say to us what we need to hear about the subject matter.
Well, I already know about that. Or I don't agree with that. This is where the question of truth comes in. And after we've struggled with what I call the appropriation of the text -- first the comprehension, then the appropriation of the text -- and then, finally, we come to the question of the significance of the text. And let me say to you that I think this is the greatest need for those of us who seriously try to preach biblical sermons. Just because you spend 20 to 25
or 30 minutes talking about the Bible on a Sunday morning does not mean that you're preaching biblically. There are a lot of people who come to church and love to hear Bible stories and go right out the door. And it just goes whoo; it doesn't make any difference whatsoever because the story never touches life where they live. And most of us have our greater trouble in finding the application. But look for the significance of the text. What does it appear that the author intended the significance to be?
And then begin to look for historical analogies. The Letter to the Galatians is a beautiful example. Paul is in Galatians struggling against [Judaizers?], that is, Jewish Christians or Christian Jews -- whichever way you prefer it -- who were coming to his churches in Galatia, saying, "Paul only told you half the good truth, half the good news." What you now need is to submit to the Law of Moses and land of the faithful Jews
so that being a Christian is a matter of believing in Jesus Christ and keeping the Law. Now, [friends?], to the best of my knowledge, there ain't nobody out there where you come from or where I came from who's worried about that sort of thing. In 29 years of pastoral ministry, I never ever once met a Judaizer.
OK? But then, you ask yourself, now, look what happened in the Reformation, when Luther go a hold of this text and when the text got a hold of Luther. Now, Luther wasn't living in the first century and his situation really was not bad as the Galatian churches and, yet, Luther recognized an historical and a validic-- a valid analogy between his religious situation and that of first-century Galatia.
His was to deal with Catholicism, theirs was Judaize. But in a formal sense, they were the same because both were confusing human merit with God's grace and seeking to mix the two. And that was the error. And because Luther perceived that historical analogy, he could preach the letters to the Galatians or from the letter to the Galatians in a way that opened up
the lives of his people. They knew he was speaking to them and that's what we must discover in our preaching, is how to find those historical analogies which allow us to apply what the Bible says about its subject matter to our situation in a way that instinctively people recognize has great power. So that's what we're going to be doing. And that's a little
outline. Meaning has three dimensions: the sense, the reference, and the significance of the text. The interpreter must seek to do three things: comprehend the sense of the text, appropriate the reference of the text -- that means integrate it some way into your theology, into your understanding, into your life -- and, finally, seek to find those historical analogies which allow the text to be applied in the modern situation in a way that is really legitimate.
OK, that's for free and I just threw that in. Now, we all know that the letter to the Galatians is a letter. Or do we? Are you acquainted with the literature on first century letter writing, first century letter forms? I'm not going to bore you to death with that,
except to say that these really are letters. And when you read the letter to the Galatians, you're reading somebody else's mail. That's what makes it so difficult. You see, when you write to someone, there's a whole world of mutual understanding that you can assume, and so everything doesn't need to be spelled out. Because you know that you -- the recipient
of your letter is in on all this and will understand exactly your allusions and your references. We're not the intended receivers of the letter. And we're not in on that shared pool of information. And that's what makes the letter so difficult; we're always having to reconstruct the other half, the other side, as best we can, from the text itself. But these are letters. Paul's letters begin the way all
ancient letters begin, with the prescript, or the superscription, as it's sometimes called. Super -- writing above -- instead of sub-scripture -- writing beneath. We always write our business letters: name, address, city and state, dear so-and-so, and then we get into what we call the body of the letter, which may be one, two, three, four -- if it's very important, five -- paragraphs. And then we [just?] sign off, sincerely yours, faithfully yours, cordially yours, whatever, and sign our names at the bottom. That's the way we write
letters. That's not the way they wrote letters. They signed their names at the top. Sometime, when you have a few moments, sit down and just thumb through Paul's Letters in the New Testament and see what he does through the simple superscription. It always begins Paul -- or Paul and Timothy, or Paul and Silas and Timothy, or Paul and somebody. But that would be enough, in and of itself. Notice what he does
with that. In Romans, it takes him seven verses to get to the [ad scription?]. It took him seven verses to identify himself in Romans. And then, your ad scription, of course, is the name of folks to whom you're writing, and see what he does with that. [So take another look in?] Corinthians. And then the salutation which,
in the ancient world, was [green?] (inaudible). Well, Paul was very clever, you know. He sees the little play on words between (inaudible) and he's also a good Jew and he knows that the Jewish letters always began with "shalom" instead of greeting, and so he makes a little creation, a little literary creation. And Paul says, "grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord
Jesus Christ." So he's developing the ancient Greece letter forms. If you always sit down and read through Paul's letters, you will note that after the salutations, in every single one except one -- the letter begins with a thanksgiving. Or, in the case of [Ephesians?] and Corinthians 2, a blessing. Now, "giving thanks to God" in Hebrew
is (inaudible). "Blessing God," in Hebrew is (Hebrew). We know from the Dead Sea Scrolls that these were interchangeable ways of either praising God, either through thanksgiving or through blessing. So there's no horrendous distinction between the two, but every single one of Paul's authentic letters in the New Testament begins with a prayer of thanksgiving or a prayer of blessing, except one. And the one is the letter to Galatians.
There is no prayer of thanksgiving in the letter to the Galatians. And there is no prayer of blessing in the letter to the Galatians. Now, how have scholars dealt with this. I mean, this really is an interesting phenomenon. What is the significance of that? Well, you read the old commentaries, they would tell you that Paul was so upset and so angry that he could think of nothing to be thankful for and nothing to
bless God for in Galatia and so he begins instead with the phrase "I am [amazed?]." Well, it's not the neat little psychological interpretation, which probably has no grounding whatsoever in the truth. Why did Paul not begin the Letter to the Galatians with a prayer of thanksgiving? Lord have mercy, the Corinthians gave him
nothing but trouble. I mean, they had more problems in the church than [Carter had?] (inaudible). And yet -- and yet, Paul could think of some very important things to thank God for about the Corinthian church. So just because there's trouble in the church doesn't mean there's no reason to be grateful. And that's a lesson for us as well. (inaudible), now a professor of New Testament
at the University of Chicago's Divinity School, but formerly of Clermont, where I did my graduate work, took seriously this [strange?] bit of New Testament data and, because he himself was, really, an expert in the literature of the period surrounding the New Testament on both sides, but particularly the Greek side -- the Hellenistic side -- he came up with
the suggestion which you have a copy of, under the rubric -- the apologetic letter form -- and published originally in 1975, in New Testament studies. He came up with a suggestion that Paul's letter to the Galatians represents not just a letter but a specific kind of letter. That is to say, it represents a letter written in the rhetorical style of
a -- an apology, that is, a defense. The (inaudible) is that of a courtroom. There is a judge, the jury, the accuser, and the defense -- defendant. Paul, in this case, is the defendant. He has been accused of something and
must now defend himself before the court. And in the rhetorical handbooks of the ancient world, there was a specific way of going about this. And it is Dr. [Betz's?] suggestion that Paul's letter is, in fact, an adaptation of that rhetorical form, of the apologetic speech. Now, this suggestion, in fact, has become the very basis of his commentary
on Galatians in the [hermenea?] series and it has received wide comments and scrutiny by the scholarly community; not everyone is persuaded -- I need to tell you that -- not everyone is persuaded, primarily because Betz cannot produce other letters out of the first century world that would qualify as apologetic letters which then could be compared with the letter to the Galatians. But perhaps, the wisest thing
that has been said is that this hypothesis is helpful if it enables us to better understand the letter to the Galatians. So I'm passing it along to you and with my conviction that it does, in fact, help us understand the letter to the Galatians in a -- an infinitely more fruitful way than any of the outlines that you will find in any of the standard commentaries on the letter to
the Galatians. You know, introduction, historical, doctrinal, conclusion. That's the basic outline; that is totally unhelpful. You see, Paul did not think that way. Paul as a first-century man might well have thought this way. But let's just quickly look at this apologetic letter form. It has this -- the ordinary prescript, with the three parts. And then comes what Betz calls the exordium, also called the [pro-oenium?]
or the [principium?]. It serves a rhetorical purpose of gaining the attention of the readers and setting forth the facts which have occasion to dispute and [thus the writing?] of the letter. Now, if you will take the other sheet and lay it side-by-side, or hold it hand-in-hand, you'll see how these things line up. The exordium, on the one sheet, becomes the introduction in the body of the letter.
In other words, where, ordinarily, you would have had a thanksgiving, you have, now, this exordium, this principium, this introduction, the purpose of which is to gain the attention of the readers and to set forth the facts which have occasion to dispute and thus the writing of the letter. "I am amazed that you are so soon deserting Him who called you in the grace of Christ and turning to a different gospel,"
which is not really another gospel, "But there are those among you who would subvert the gospel of Christ." Now, that's not bad for getting somebody's attention. That's not bad for openers. Then comes what Betz calls the [noratio?], supplies the relevant facts which have a bearing upon the case and which support the position of the writer. It's clear, as you read the letter, that it is not only Paul's Gospel that's under attack, but
his [apostleship?] as well. In other words, the best way to discredit a person's message is to discredit the person. Then you don't have to deal with the message. So Paul's credentials are under attack in Galatia and what he has to show are two things. First of all, he has to demonstrate that his gospel that he preaches and that he preached to them and which they believe -- now, as he says to the Corinthians, "In which you stand and by which you
are saved if you hold it fast." But this gospel is, on the one hand, not dependent for its authority upon the Jerusalem apostles. Paul, in the letter to the Galatians, the pillar. But Paul has an independence from them with regard to the source of his gospel. But at the same time, he wants to show that his gospel has the [imprimatur?] of the [pillar apostles?].
And so this whole section -- chapter one, versus 11 to chapter two, verse 14 -- really, is the closest thing we have to an autobiography of Paul. There's more autobiography in this section of Galatians than there is any place else in all of Paul's letters. So it goes through the various episodes that have led up to the present moment, when the crisis has come. Then comes what Betz calls the [proposition?],
which is translated out as the proposition, in chapter two, versus 15-21. And I find this to be the most helpful suggestion of all. The proposition functions in a two-fold way. First of all, it summarizes the legal content of the narration by its outline of the case and, secondly, it provides a transition to the defense and confirmation, which follows in support of the proposition. That is to say, what is the
issue that will be argued in the rest of the letter? And it is stated very clearly here, in chapter two, verse 15-21. Then comes the [probocio?], which submits the proof in support of the proposition. But the purpose is to establish the credibility of the defense by a system of arguments and then you will find that, I think -- and this is where I depart from Betz -- he has a different
outline, but it begins at chapter three, verse one, and continues through chapter four, verse 11. Betz sees this as a series of several arguments; I would argue that it is one argument. It is one argument. It is an argument that begins with an appeal to the experience of the Galatians of the Holy Spirit. I know that drives Presbyterians crazy, but that's how Paul does it. See, he -- it is an appeal to their experience of the
Spirit of God at work in their life and in their congregation. Then he tries to show how that experience is, in fact, the fulfillment of the promise made ages ago to Abraham by God. And so it ends up, in chapter four, in what is called an [inclusion?] -- an [inclusion?] -- starting with one thing, going through a long line of arguments,
coming back to that one point, where he says, "We are -- God has sent the Spirit of the Son into our hearts (inaudible) the Father and therefore we are no longer aliens, but we are now the children of God." So that the experience of the Spirit is a testimony to a new status in life and, thus, to a new identity in life. And that whole section, all of chapter three and the first 11 verses of chapter four, are devoted
to the development of that theme. Jesus is the fulfillment of the purpose of the promise given to Abraham and Jesus is the one through whom the Spirit has been mediated. And the Spirit, then, is a litmus to the fulfillment of the covenant promise. And finally, then we come to the [exhortation?], which is the [paramesis?], which serves to set forth the author's [ethical?] exhortation that follows from the defense of his position.
And this exhortation, which begins in chapter four, verse 12, and goes through chapter six, verse 10, really is under the rubric of freedom. The freedom of the Christian person, the freedom of the Christian life, which Paul sees as the expression or the consequence of the defense of his proposition, namely that we are justified by faith. And I'm going to take a little different turn,
there, we are not justified by our faith, but I think the text actually says we are justified by the faith of Jesus Christ. So we -- I won't get into that now, but we will on Wednesday. We are justified by the faith of Jesus Christ, the faithful one. So it is not our faith that saves but the faith of Christ that is redemptive. And then the letter closes.
So let me suggest that you do one thing between now and tomorrow: take these two sheets and lay them out and read through the letter to the Galatians. You can read the letter to the Galatians in [23 minutes?], if you don't stop to ponder. I think it's important to read the Bible that way.
(inaudible) custom, especially ministers who are looking for text to preach from, or we atomize the Scripture, and what we need are sweeping readings of Scripture. So sit down, between now and tomorrow, and at least twice -- maybe once tonight, before you hit the hay, and once in the morning, after your morning coffee. Just lay this out and, according to this outline. Now, this is not canonical. I
I am not pretending that it's at al canonical; it is a suggestion. It is a [furistic?] device. It is a way that may help you understand the letter to the Galatians. Read the letter to the Galatians with this in mind and see whether or not, in fact, having this kind of an overview, this kind of a structure helps or doesn't help you in understanding his message. Now, tomorrow we'll be -- we will be focusing on the introduction and the
part of the narration where Paul speaks of the source of his gospel as being located in the revelations of God. And I think that'll be very interesting and even provocative, it may even make you mad. Anyway, thank you so much.