Gal 1:11-24

Called to preach Christ

Warm-up: What has had the greatest impact on you to ever change the course of your life?

Read: Galatians 1:11-24

1) vv11-12: What did Paul want his readers to know, and why didn’t they reject this claim outright as delusional?

• What elements here are red flags for skeptics, modern and ancient alike?
  
  • v12: What reactions do you expect if tomorrow you start to tell everyone that you received a ‘revelation’ from a deceased person? Why would their incredulity come as no surprise?
  • How then do you explain that Paul apparently could convince millions of Christians to this day that he was no lunatic?

2) What aspects of his own CV did Paul highlight to substantiate his claim?

• If you were unconvinced that Paul really experienced what he described here, how else would you explain his conversion ?
  • No historian disputes that something evidently did turn around Paul by 180 degrees. What hallucination, if any, could have convinced him that his vision was no hallucination?
• v16: How did Paul himself summarize the content of that revelation? =>
  • How do you interpret what Paul meant by “…His Son in me“? cf Ro 6:5; 2Cor 12:1-6; Phil 3:10-15
  • How does that experience of dying and being made alive with Christ differ from the ‘revelation’ of a new doctrine or system of theology? Acts 9:16; 1Cor 2:8-13; Phil 3:16-18

3) How do vv15-16 summarize what the gospel is, and what it is not?

• ‘gospel’ literally means ‘good news’. According to Paul himself, in what sense has the gospel been news to this day, and what qualifies that news as good? cf Acts 2:36 =>
  • In Paul’s opinion, is it news (and good) because it reveals who Paul is ‘in Christ’, or because it reveals who Christ is? Hint: What was Paul called to preach as good news to the whole world, v16? 
• What did Paul claim here about his own ‘identity’? Did he regard the gospel as good news because we (supposedly) get a new ‘identity’? Why, or why not?
  • Is any ‘new identity’ for Paul even mentioned at all, or did Paul talk of his new calling? v15
• Acts 13:9 mentions in passing that the name of Paul was actually a new nickname. His Hebrew name was Saul, which means “asked for” (in the sense of ‘a wish come true’). Paulus in Latin means “small”, in the sense of “despised/poor”). If this name change signifies anything at all about “who” he had become, what could that be?
  • “…called me by his grace“, v15: Where did Paul’s tangible sense of wonder come from about his new calling? Why did he recognize it as “gracious”, rather than as a reward for his past effort and zeal?
  • What does that experience show about what the nature of grace really is?

4) Read Lk 18:11. In the words of that devoted Pharisee, what did God’s grace mean to him?

• By contrast, what did it mean e.g. for the woman described in Lk 7:47?

• How could the word “grace” have so diametrically opposed meanings for different people?
• In an influential article entitled The Apostel Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West, the late theologian Krister Stendahl called for a “New Perspective” of God’s grace, claiming that Paul understood it primarily as God’s ecumenical solution how to incorporate Gentiles into the Jewish church, rather than as forgiveness for personal sins (for which the Jews already had a solution with their sacrificial system). How do you think Paul would have responded?
  • E.g., how does this so-called “New Perspective on Paul” square with the fact that neither Paul himself nor any of the characters in the stories above from Luke’s gospel were Gentiles?