Rector et iudex: justification in Reformation rhetoric

‘It is well-known that the . . . reformers proclaimed [justification] as the doctrine by which the church “stands or falls”. It is, one fears, not so well-known why they would have done so.’Footnote ¹⁹ Robert Jenson wrote these words in 1978, but they still invite an under-asked question: What did the reformers mean when they said things like justification is the ‘main hinge on which religion turns’,Footnote ²⁰ or that ‘when this article stands the church stands; when it falls the church falls’?Footnote ²¹

Part of the answer to this question is that justification names the site of a sixteenth-century battle and the flag the reformers followed when they ‘fought and conquered in the name of Paul’. For Luther, however, justification was more than just a battle site or standard; it was the ‘single solid rock’.Footnote ²² This is, at its core, a pastoral claim, as justification identifies God's unconditioned grace as the only ground of ‘rest’ for ‘your bones and mine’.Footnote ²³ But it is also a statement about the distinctive theological function of justification, as exemplified by statements like, ‘The doctrine of justification must be learned diligently. For in it are included all other doctrines of our faith; and if it is sound, all the others are sound as well.’Footnote ²⁴ Or the claim that justification is ‘the lord, ruler, and judge of every kind of doctrine, which preserves and governs Christian teaching’.Footnote ²⁵

It is as an interpretation of these kinds of sentences that the specification of justification as a doctrinal ‘centre’ develops. Martin Kähler had already called justification the evangelische Grundartikel, but according to Risto Saarinen, it was Hans Iwand's Glaubensgerechtigkeit nach Luthers Lehre (1941) that shaped the subsequent language of Mitte and Zentrum.Footnote ²⁶ As Iwand read Luther, justification stands as the ‘immovable centre’.Footnote ²⁷ This description, however, is interpreted by a contrast and a series of supplementary images: justification occupies the ‘centre’ rather than the ‘periphery’; justification is ‘critical’ as opposed to ‘secondary’; justification is the ‘core’ and functions as the ‘critical axis from which we can decide whether or not the church preaches the gospel’.Footnote ²⁸ These images invited a proliferation of centralising characterisations of justification: it is the theological ‘discrimen’, the ‘Grund und Grenze’, and the ‘Mitte und Grenze reformatorisher Theologie’.Footnote ²⁹ But just as Iwand used the language of ‘centre’ to indicate the function of justification as a ‘critical axis from which we can decide whether or not the church preaches the gospel’, words like Mitte and Zentrum are ways of describing ‘Die Rechtfertigungslehre als Kriterium’ or, in the words of Gerhard Gloege, ‘als hermeneutische Kategorie’.Footnote ³⁰ Within this language-game, the predicate ‘centre’ does ‘not give preference to one Christian doctrine amongst many others’; rather it points to ‘the proper function of the doctrine of justification’, identifying it as the ‘touchstone of theology’ or the ‘standard of theological judgment’.Footnote ³¹ Justification is a criterion, an evangelical canon that makes possible the judgement: this is or this is not the gospel.

For Luther, the unique significance of justification is tied to its critical and hermeneutical function. Justification ‘preserves and governs all Christian teaching’, and ‘if it is sound, all the other [doctrines] are sound as well’.Footnote ³² As a critical criterion, ‘nothing in this article can be given up’, because ‘on this article rest all that we teach and practice against the pope, the devil, and the world’.Footnote ³³ As a hermeneutical criterion, justification is ‘the lord, ruler, and judge of every kind of doctrine’.Footnote ³⁴ In Eberhard Jüngel's phrase, justification is ‘the heart of the heart’ because it is hermeneutical: ‘the best way to express the central function of justification is to highlight its hermeneutical significance for the whole of theological knowledge’.Footnote ³⁵

But hermeneutical how? In what sense does all ‘we teach and practice against the pope, the devil, and the world’ rest on justification? How does justification rule, judge, preserve, and govern theology? The answer: as an antithesis. Justification is a critical and hermeneutical criterion because it is ‘the either/or article’.Footnote ³⁶ Because justification is both ‘not by works of law’ and ‘by faith in Jesus Christ’ – because it specifies both what the gospel is not and what the gospel is – it says a ‘no’ and a ‘yes’. And it is as an antithetical grammar – not as one soteriological image among many – that justification relates to theological discourse as rector et iudex. As Jenson put it, ‘It is the mission of the church to speak the gospel . . . Theology is the hermeneutic of this work. Theology must therefore have norms by which to make the judgment, “this is/is not the gospel”.’Footnote ³⁷ The Reformation contention is that justification, with its ‘not, but’ structure, is this norm. Because it is ‘not by works of law’ it enables the identification of not-gospels; because it is ‘by faith in Jesus Christ’ it authenticates and makes audible the preaching of the gospel.

Implicit here is a distinction between first-order and second-order discourse. The first-order language of faith, for the reformers, is preaching, praise and prayer. In this register, justification takes its place alongside other biblical motifs and metaphors. But as second-order discourse – that is, as the critical and hermeneutical shaping of the sentences of faith – justification relates to preaching, praise and prayer as a grammatical rule: to speak the gospel, do not condition the grace of God by any human criteria; rather give Jesus Christ in the form of an unconditioned promise.Footnote ³⁸ It is as this kind of grammar that Paul Tillich calls justification ‘the central doctrine of the Reformation’, or in his preferred phrase, ‘the first and basic expression of the Protestant principle’: the ‘not, but’ grammar of justification means that ‘in relation to God, God alone can act and that no human claim . . . no intellectual or moral or devotional “work”, can reunite us with him’.Footnote ³⁹

The extent to which these formulations capture what Paul's ‘not’ excludes and what his ‘but’ names will be considered below. For now, the crucial point is that it is as a reading of the grammar of Paul's justification discourse that the reformers identify the unique criteriological function of justification. The Geneva Bible of 1560, for example, can call Galatians 2:16 ‘the principal scope’ of the letter, because Paul's argument against the ‘other gospel’ (Gal 1:6) and for ‘that which I preached to you’ (1:8) has both its ‘no’ and its ‘yes’ in Galatians 2:16: not works of the law, but faith in Jesus Christ.Footnote ⁴⁰ Similarly, Luther can state the argumentum of Galatians as ‘the difference between Christian righteousness and all other kinds of righteousness’, because the Pauline ‘not by works of the law’ says an anthropological no even as ‘by faith in Jesus Christ’ says a christological yes: ‘do we do nothing and work nothing in order to obtain this righteousness? I reply: Nothing at all’ – that is the no; ‘Christ . . . is my righteousness’ – that is the yes.Footnote ⁴¹ It is also the case that the ‘not, but’ grammar of justification often does this theological work without the specific vocabulary of justification. Luther's catechisms and sermons, for instance, often surprise readers with the paucity of references to justification, and yet the shape of both reflect the relationship between and movement from justification's ‘no’ to its ‘yes’: the excluding and including grammar of justification functions as an evangelical sieve, separating and filtering out all human criteria such that all that remains as gospel is the grace of God in Jesus Christ.

These examples indicate that the identification of justification as an evangelical criterion is not a claim about justification being the exclusive or even primary vocabulary of the gospel. Rather, it is the ‘not, but’ grammar of justification that enables it to function as a criterion: because it says what the gospel is not and also what the gospel is, justification functions both critically and hermeneutically. This means that justification's criteriological significance is tied to its occasional character as a Kampfeslehre. It is as Pauline polemic that justification says ‘no’ to the not-gospel and sets this excluded alterative in antithesis to ‘the gospel of Christ’ (Gal 1:7). An ‘other-gospel’ (Gal 1:6) occasioned Paul's ‘not, but’ grammar in Galatians, and it is this grammar that gives justification its criteriological function: as a critical criterion the ‘not’ of justification identifies ‘other-gospels’ as ‘not-gospels’; as a hermeneutical criterion the ‘but’ of justification both picks out and guides the proclamation of ‘the gospel of Christ’.

Justification and the grammar of Galatians

The grammar of Galatians is antithetical. Paul is an ‘apostle, not from human beings or through a human being, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father’ (Gal 1:1). The gospel Paul preaches is not κατὰ ἄνθρωπον, but ‘through a revelation of Jesus Christ’ (1:12–13). Paul's autobiography is also antithetical, shaped by the christological apocalypse that interrupts his ‘former life in Judaism’ with the call to ‘preach the faith he once tried to destroy’ (1:13, 23) and polarised by a crucified past and a christological present: ‘I no longer live’ but ‘Christ lives in me’ (2:20). The gospel Paul received and is sent to proclaim, moreover, announces the act of God in Christ that delivers sinners and slaves from ‘the present evil age’, crucifying the old cosmos and inaugurating a ‘new creation’ (1:4; 6:14–15). And this contrast between the old cosmos and the new creation contains still more polarities: the flesh and slavery belong to the old; the Spirit and freedom are part of the new. With these ‘newly minted distinctions’, as John Barclay writes, ‘Paul's letter to the Galatians . . . remaps reality’.Footnote ⁴²

But this raises a question: what criterion shapes Paul's cartography? Is there a source – an event, tradition, idea or experience – that shapes the antitheses that dot the map of Pauline theology? It would be easy to assume the obvious reformational answer: justification. But to single out justification as the antithesis that sources and shapes all the others is, at least as a reading of Paul, to skip a step. All of the antitheses that Paul articulates in Galatians occur as part of an argument against the ‘other gospel’ (1:6) and for ‘the gospel of Christ’ (1:7). The ‘other gospel’ is in fact no gospel because it cuts off from Christ and so enslaves in the present evil age (5:2–4); ‘the gospel of Christ’ is good news because it gifts the one ‘who loved me and gave himself for me’ and thereby effects life and freedom in the new creation (2:20; 5:1; 6:15). Read within the either/or between the ‘other gospel’ and ‘the gospel of Christ’, Paul's antithetical remapping of reality appears to operate according to an evangelical and christological criterion: ‘the gospel of Christ’, in antithesis to any ‘other gospel’ (cf. 1:8–9), is the ‘canon’ of Paul's cartography of the new creation (6:14–16).

This, however, still leaves one crucial question: according to what evangelical criterion is Paul able to make the judgment ‘this is the gospel of Christ’ or ‘this is a different gospel’? How does Paul know that the gospel of the agitators is a ‘different gospel’ than ‘the gospel of Christ’? It is as an attempt to answer these kinds of questions that the antithesis of Galatians 2:16 stands out: justification is not ἐξ ἔργων νόμου but ἐκ πίστεως Χριστοῦ (Gal 2:16). This lexical set (i.e. righteousness, law, faith) is not the only language Paul speaks when speaking the gospel. In Galatians, salvation is figured as forgiveness, deliverance, participation, liberation and adoption. But what is unique about justification is that it is articulated as an antithesis: not ἐξ ἔργων νόμου but ἐκ πίστεως Χριστοῦ. This either/or alternative is introduced as an argument against the ‘other gospel’ and as an argument for ‘the truth of the gospel’ (2:14). And it is in this context – both polemical and proclamatory – that justification functions in Galatians as a critical and hermeneutical criterion: when Paul says justification is ‘not by works of law’, he identifies and says no to the other gospel; when Paul says justification is ‘by Christ-faith’, he picks out and preaches ‘the gospel of Christ’.Footnote ⁴³

To interpret the antithesis of Galatians 2:16 is therefore to identify, at least in the context of the crisis that occasioned the letter, both what the gospel is not and what the gospel is. For Paul, as regards justification, ἔργα νόμου and πίστις Χριστοῦ are antithetical: justification is not by ἔργα νόμου ‘but’ (ἐὰν μή) by πίστις Χριστοῦ (16a); Paul and other Jewish Christians (ἡμεῖς) trust in Christ to be justified on the basis of πίστις Χριστοῦ ‘and not’ (καὶ οὐκ) on the basis of ἔργα νόμου (16c).Footnote ⁴⁴ As Martinus de Boer notes, the effect of this antithesis is a kind of grammatical chemistry, ‘separating justification’ from ἔργα νόμου ‘and binding it instead and exclusively to’ πίστις Χριστοῦ.Footnote ⁴⁵ As part of Paul's evangelical Kampf this antithesis is an argument (or announcement) about ‘the truth of the gospel’ (2:14). It is not just that justification is not ἐξ ἔργων νόμου but ἐκ πίστεως Χριστοῦ; Paul's contention is also that justification ἐξ ἔργων νόμου is not the gospel whereas justification ἐκ πίστεως Χριστοῦ is. But why?Footnote ⁴⁶

As noted above, the ‘Protestant principle’ answers this question by reading the negation of ἔργα νόμου, in Tillich's words, as a ‘no’ to any ‘human claim’ – that is, to any ‘intellectual or moral or devotional “work”’. This interpretation, which is especially strong in the tradition stemming from Augustine (and including Luther), emphasises the ἔργα in the phrase ἔργα νόμου: ‘works’ names the fundamental form of idolatry that is the identification of the self as the subject of salvation.Footnote ⁴⁷ Paul, however, at least in Galatians, abbreviates ἔργα νόμου as νόμος, suggesting to some that the accent is on the law and, given the situation in Galatia, particularly on the way the law erects boundaries between Jew and non-Jew.Footnote ⁴⁸ But Paul's ‘no’ seems both more comprehensive and more christological. The occasionally formulated ‘no’ to ‘works of law’ occurs in an antithesis that rhymes – grammatically – with other antitheses in Galatians that negate all that is anthropological and old: the ‘gospel of Christ’ is neither ‘from a human source’ nor ‘in accord with human norms’ (1:11–12); the cross of Christ crucifies the old cosmos and renders the religious and cultural criteria of that world irrelevant (6:14–15). These not-clauses limn the negative grammar of the gospel: ‘the gospel of Christ’ is unconditioned by the criteria of the old age and the predicates of the old ἄνθρωπος.Footnote ⁴⁹ For Paul, this cosmic and anthropological ‘no’ is spoken in the cross. Both the cosmos and the human ‘I’ are crucified with Christ (6:14; 2:20). Paul's negations are therefore a christologically grounded reduction to nothing – the ‘no’ is de-creation and death.Footnote ⁵⁰

‘But’: this adversative, which lives in Paul's antitheses at the site of nothingness and death, opens clauses that name Christ as the one who contradicts the conditions of the old cosmos. Where the old age ends: ‘new creation’ (6:14–15). Where the human ‘I’ dies: ‘Christ lives in me’ (2:20). The grammar of the gospel, in its antithetical expression, is a grammar of nothingness and creation – a grammar of death and life. This is evident in Galatians 2:16 in the incongruity between the gift that gives righteousness and its recipients: it is not given to those considered righteous by the law but to those the law diagnoses as ‘sinners’ (Gal 2:15, 17). The divine action communicated by the verb δικαιόω is thus necessarily creative rather than confirmatory: God does not ratify a righteousness regulated by the law; he gives Christ to those whom the law labels sinners and thereby recreates them as righteous. The antithetical grammar of Galatians 2:16, therefore, expresses a fundamental contrast between the old and the new, between death and life. Within the dispute about the law that occasioned Galatians, ‘not by works of law’ is the contextual way of saying ‘no’ to the old and the anthropological. But if the range of Paul's ‘no’ is as wide as the old world, the rationale for this negation is as specific as a single name: Jesus Christ, the gift who contradicts the old and creates the new.

Galatians 2:21 concludes the paragraph of 2:15–21 with the same contrast that opens it: ‘I do not reject the grace of God, for if righteousness is through the law, then Christ died in vain’ (2:21). The terms νόμος, Χριστός, and δικαιοσύνη pick up the antithesis of Galatians 2:16. But this is more than a restatement; it is a theological interpretation: justification ἐξ ἔργων νόμου invalidates the gift of Christ and voids the cross, while justification ἐκ πίστεως Χριστοῦ names Christ crucified as the gift that gives righteousness. This suggests that the rationale for Paul's rejection of ἔργα νόμου as the basis or source of justitication is ‘charismatic’ and christological – that is, it is about ‘the grace (χάρις) of God’ and the death of Christ (Χριστός). Galatians 1:6 and 5:4 confirm this: for Paul, the Galatians’ attraction to ‘works of law’ (3:3, 5) amounts to an abandoning of ‘the one who called you in the grace (χάρις) of Christ’ (Χριστός, 1:6); to allow circumcision and so to be ‘justified by the law’ is to be ‘cut off from Christ’ (Χριστός) and to ‘fall away from grace’ (χάρις, 5:3–4). For Paul, ‘the truth of the gospel’ in Galatia, as in Jerusalem and Antioch before (2:5, 14), is either/or: either the law and its works or the divine gift that is the self-giving of Christ (cf. 1:4; 2:20). It is the death of Christ, not the law, that justifies, and it is this christological gift – the cross – that is ‘the grace of God’ (2:21). The antithetical grammar of justification therefore poses a mutually exclusive alternative: either not-Christ or Christ. Justification ἐξ ἔργων νόμου is not the gospel because the gospel is always and only ‘the gospel of Christ’.

In saying that justification is not by ‘works of law’, then, Paul is saying what the gospel is not: the gospel is not all that is not-Christ. The other side of the antithesis in Galatians 2:16 says what the gospel is: Christ. In Galatians 2:15–21, Paul uses the language of righteousness and justification to interpret the death of Christ. ‘If righteousness is through the law,’ Paul argues, ‘then Christ died for nothing’ (2:21; cf. 2:16–17). It is this ‘grace of God’ – the death of Christ – that Paul does not ‘reject’ (2:14), because whereas justification by ‘works of law’ voids the cross, justification ἐκ πίστεως Χριστοῦ confesses ‘the one who loved me and gave himself for me’ as the justifying gift. It is in this sense that the phrase ‘but by Christ-faith’ communicates the gospel. Justification ἐκ πίστεως Χριστοῦ means ‘to be justified in Christ’ (2:17). Justification ἐκ πίστεως Χριστοῦ means that the gift that justifies is Christ crucified (2:21; cf. 1:4; 2:20). This suggests that πίστις Χριστοῦ is a way of naming Jesus Christ as the gift that gives righteousness – or better: as the gift who is ‘our righteousness’ (cf. 1 Cor 1:30). In the theology and exegesis of the Reformation, the translation ‘faith in Christ’ means exactly this: it identifies Jesus Christ as the one by, in and on the basis of whom God justifies the ungodly.Footnote ⁵¹ But however πίστις Χριστοῦ is translated, it articulates ‘the gospel of Christ’ in antithesis to a ‘different gospel’ because it proclaims rather than rejects ‘the grace of God’ that is the cross of Christ. It is as an antithesis – as the mutually exclusive alternative of either not-Christ or only Christ – that justification gives the grammar of the gospel. As the reformers might put it, πίστις Χριστοῦ, in antithesis to ἔργα νόμου, is a Pauline way of saying solus Christus.Footnote ⁵²

The grammar of the gospel, then, as it comes to expression in the antithesis of Galatians 2:16, is christological and just so charismatic, incongruous and creative. It is Christ crucified: an unconditioned gift, given to sinners, which recreates them as righteous. This grammar says ‘no’ to any ‘other gospel’: anything that is not Christ is not the gospel. But this grammar also says ‘the gospel of Christ’: at the site of sin, slavery, nothingness and death, God gives Christ as the gift that creates e contrario: righteousness, freedom, new creation and life.

A critical criterion

Galatians repeatedly says ‘no’ to not-gospels, to the agitators, the ψευδάδελφοι and to Peter. But how does Paul distinguish ‘the truth of the gospel’ from a ‘different gospel’? What criterion enables the critical judgement that something is not the gospel?

The occasion of Galatians can only be tentatively reconstructed, but Paul says enough to indicate the correspondence between the prior events in Jerusalem and Antioch and the current crisis in Galatia (2:1–10, 11–14). While the majority of the believers in Galatia are of non-Jewish origin (4:8), there is a compulsion to join their commitment to Christ with the observance of the Torah. Paul's use of the phrase ‘another gospel’ (1:6), his appeal to analogous disputes in Jerusalem and Antioch with Jewish believers in Christ (2:1–14), and the language of ‘starting’ and ‘finishing’ (3:1–5) all suggest that those Paul perceived as opponents were Jewish Christ followers.Footnote ⁵³ This means that their message was likely one of complementarity rather than competition: that is, Paul's opponents likely argued that it is not Christ or Torah; it is Christ and Torah. It is here, where a Pauline ‘or’ confronts an un-evangelical ‘and’, that the grammar of justification functions as a critical criterion.Footnote ⁵⁴

Paul's ‘no’ to the ‘different gospel’ takes the form of saying ‘no’ to justification by works of the law.Footnote ⁵⁵ The occasion helps to account for the specific language Paul employs: the terms ‘righteousness’, ‘law’ and ‘faith’ have Israel's scripture as their source (Gal 3:6, 10–12) and the Gentile mission as their Sitz im Leben. The vocabulary of Galatians 2:16, in other words, is traditional. The grammar, however, is uniquely Pauline: justification is not by works of law, but by Christ-faith.Footnote ⁵⁶ This ‘not, but’ grammar, as argued above, poses an evangelical either/or: either not-Christ, or only Christ. It is as this mutually exclusive alternative that justification functions in Galatians as a critical criterion. Where the agitators put an ‘and’, Paul puts an antithesis: not ‘Christ and the law’, but simply ‘Christ’. Righteousness comes either through the law or through the death of Christ (2:21). ‘To be justified by the law’ – in this case, to undergo circumcision – does not complement or complete ‘the gospel of Christ’; it ‘cut[s] off from Christ’ (5:4). ‘In place of the agitators’ synthesis of faith in Christ and the law’, writes Moo, ‘Paul insists on an antithesis: it is Christ and therefore not the law.’Footnote ⁵⁷

There is little indication, however, that Paul's antithesis between Christ and the law is grounded in an opposition to the law per se: uncircumcision, just as much as circumcision, is ‘not worth anything’ (οὔτε. . .τι ἰσχύει, 5:6; cf. 1 Cor 7:17–19). As Luther might put it, the issue is not whether the law is good; the issue is whether the law is the gospel. In Barclay's words, ‘to require circumcision . . . is to place the Christ-event within the parameters of worth defined by the Jewish tradition, and that would make the Christ-gift conditioned by something outside and before itself’.Footnote ⁵⁸ The problem, in other words, is that the agitators’ ‘and’ erases the gospel's ‘alone’ – the solus Christus. Paul's critique is an application of this grammatical rule in the opposite direction. ‘Christ alone’ erases any ‘and’ that is a non-christological condition of the gospel: neither uncircumcision nor circumcision, neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female (5:6; 3:28). To condition the gift of Christ by any religious, cultural, moral or social criteria is to disqualify its essential character as an unconditioned gift. The ‘gospel of Christ’, Paul insists, is only and exclusively Christ.

It is as an expression of this exclusivity – that is, as a grammar that excludes – that the antithesis of Galatians 2:16 functions as a critical criterion. The terms of Paul's argument target the situation in Galatia and recall the disputes in Jerusalem and Antioch. The not-clause of the antithesis identifies and critiques the ‘other gospel’: justification is not by works of the law. This ‘not’, however, is not grounded in a ‘no’ to the law. ‘Not by works of law’, rather, is the contextual spelling of the ‘un-’ that defines Christ as an unconditioned gift. It is as an expression of this either/or that the ‘not, but’ grammar of justification is a critical criterion. The grammar of Galatians 2:16, as an antithesis, says Christ alone.

A hermeneutical criterion

Justification functions as a critical and hermeneutical criterion in Galatians because it says ‘no’ to the ‘other gospel’ even as it says ‘the gospel of Christ’. As an argument against the ‘other gospel’ and for ‘the gospel of Christ’, Galatians 2:16 says what the gospel is not and what the gospel is: the gospel is not conditioned by any of the non-christological criteria of the old cosmos; the gospel is Jesus Christ, the gift who contradicts the old and creates the new. The previous section considered the critical side of this criteriological function. This section will demonstrate that justification also functions as a hermeneutical criterion.

‘Hermeneutics’, as Jenson puts it, concerns the fusion of two horizons that occurs ‘where past hearing turns to new speaking’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Paul's letter to the churches of Galatia is ‘new speaking’, but it includes the interpretation of ‘past hearing’: Israel's scripture is listened to and reread, the gospel the Galatians once heard is recalled and repreached, and Paul's ‘former life’ is remembered and retold. The hermeneutical function of justification is traceable, in a limited way, as Paul uses terms from the ‘semantic domain’ of justification to interpret these texts and histories: the language of law, righteousness and faith permeate Paul's engagement with Israel's scripture, his account of the Galatians’ reception of the Spirit is cast in terms of the contrast between faith and ‘works of law’, and the paradigmatic ‘I’ of Galatians 2:19–20 dies ‘to the law’ and lives ‘in faith’.Footnote ⁶⁰ For Paul, however, these are not just discrete histories; they fuse at the horizon he calls ‘the gospel of Christ’: Israel's canonical texts ‘pre-preach the gospel’ (3:8), the Galatian believers are being drawn towards a ‘different gospel’ and away from ‘the gospel of Christ’ (1:6–10), and Paul's ‘calling through grace’ (1:15) culminates in Paul ‘preaching the gospel’ (1:23). Justification is therefore a hermeneutical criterion in Galatians not only as it informs Paul's interpretations, but also (and especially) as his interpretations identify these pasts as promises and paradigms of the gospel.

Justification functions in just this way, I will argue, as a grammar. It is as an antithesis that Galatians 2:16 gives the grammar of the gospel: not not-Christ, but only Christ. This is not an isolated antithesis, however; it is a Pauline pattern of speech – it is the grammar of the gospel according to which Paul writes Galatians. Even in those places in the letter where the vocabulary of justification is (largely) absent, the christological and antithetical grammar of Galatians 2:16 moulds Paul's stories and readings of scripture into the shape of the gospel: not the old cosmos, but the unconditioned and creative gift of Christ.

Graham Stanton has noticed this hermeneutical function of Galatians 2:16: the ‘antithesis between those who are ἐξ ἔργων νόμου and those who are ἐκ πίστεως’ introduces ‘key musical notes in contrasting thematic phrases’. For Stanton, the ‘sound map’ of Galatians is divided by this antithesis, with some ‘satellite words and phrases’ going with πίστις (e.g. ἡ ἐπαγγελία, ἡ κληρνομία, υἱοί and τέκνα of Abraham or of God, and the δικ- word group) and others going with νόμος (e.g. ἡ κατάρα and δοῦλος).Footnote ⁶¹ This list of ‘satellites’ could be expanded, with terms such as ‘grace’, ‘Christ’, ‘Spirit’ and ‘calling’ dotting one side of the Pauline map, while ‘curse’, ‘flesh’, ‘cosmos’, στοχεῖα and ἄνθρωπος dot the other. This is what Stanton means when he suggests (quoting the words of G. S. Duncan) that Galatians 2:16 ‘is the text on which all that follows in the Epistle is commentary’.Footnote ⁶² The antithesis of Galatians 2:16 plays the ‘key notes’ that shape the ‘sound map’ of the letter – that is, the antithesis between ‘works of law’ and ‘Christ-faith’ functions as a hermeneutic as it provides the headings under which other parts of the letter can be grouped.

Applied to the stories Paul recounts and the scriptures he interprets, the antithetical grammar of Galatians 2:16 shapes Paul's speech as it splits each story he tells into two. There is, in Galatians, no unbroken story of the self or of salvation history. There is an old story and a new story, an old self and a new, an old cosmos and a new creation, a time ‘before’ and ‘the fullness of time’ (4:4). Paul can narrate history κατὰ ἄνθρωπον, but that means talking about his ‘former’ (ποτέ, 1:13) life, remembering the condition of the Galatians ‘then’ (τότε, 4:8) and tracing the history of Israel ‘before’ (πρό, 3:23). This side of the stories consists of what Stanton calls the ‘satellites’ that correspond to Paul's negation of νόμος in Galatians 2:16. Paul's ‘former life’ is situated within a cultural, ethnic, familial and religious context identifiable as ‘Judaism’ (1:13). Within this sphere he is the subject of his own existence and his progress and zeal are measurable both according to a standard (‘the traditions of my ancestors’) and relative to his peers (‘I advanced beyond many of my people of the same age’, 1:14). For the Galatian believers, their ‘then’ was a time of theological ignorance and enslavement – slaves both to ‘beings that by nature are not gods’ and to ‘the elements of the cosmos’ (4:3, 8). Similarly, if more surprisingly, Israel's time ‘before’ – their time ‘under the law’ – is interpreted as an era of ‘captivity’, a time of being ‘imprisoned until . . .’ (3:21–5; cf. 4:21–31).

In Paul's telling, however, each of these old stories ends. Paul's autobiography is interrupted: ‘but when God’ (1:15). The Galatians’ time of ‘not knowing God’ is contradicted and overcome: ‘But now you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God’ (4:9). Israel's imprisonment under the law ends: ‘But now that faith has come’ (3:25). On the far side of these adversatives, Paul's new stories consist of the ‘satellites’ that correspond to but-clause of Galatians 2:16. Paul is ‘called through grace’ (1:15), just as the Galatians are ‘called by grace’.Footnote ⁶³ The Galatian believers, like those formerly under the Jewish law, are ‘set free’ or ‘redeemed’ (4:5; 5:1); they are made children of Abraham or the promise and so of God – they are no longer slaves but adopted children who have received the Spirit and so say ‘Abba’ (3:26–4:7; cf. 4:8–9).

The grammar of Galatians 2:16, however, does more than play two contrasting notes. As an antithesis the ‘not, but’ grammar of justification names and negates the old as it identifies and announces the new. Paul's theology, in other words, is not about the kind of balance or equilibrium indicated by the word ‘and’ in pairings like ‘old and new’, ‘death and life’, ‘sin and righteousness’. As an antithesis, Galatians 2:16 does not say ‘and’; it says ‘not, but’, and thereby limns a grammar that both names a battle and proclaims the victor: the end of the old cosmos and from that nothingness, new creation (6:14–15); the old I ‘no longer lives’, but from that death, resurrection – ‘Christ lives in me’ (2:20). This unconditioned and creative grace patterns Paul's stories and reading of scripture. Paul's ‘calling through grace’ occurs without regard to his ‘former life in Judaism’ because God's act of setting Paul apart took place before there is a Paul (1:15).Footnote ⁶⁴ The Galatians were ‘called by grace’ (1:6) while they were still enslaved and theologically ignorant (4:3, 8–9), just as Israel was still imprisoned under the law when they were redeemed from the curse of the law (3:21–4:7; cf. 3:13).Footnote ⁶⁵ In Paul's stories the old self, sin and slavery are terms that name the nothingness from which God's grace creates e contrario: a new ‘I’ (1:15ff.; 2:20), righteousness (2:16; 3:8; 5:5) and freedom (4:5; 5:1).

The grammar of Paul's stories and scriptural interpretation is, like the grammar of Galatians 2:16, antithetical: there is a rupture between the old and the new – a death and a resurrection. The grammar of Galatians 2:16 – that is, the grammar of the incongruous and creative gift – is the grammar according to which Paul reads scripture and writes stories. The language of death and resurrection, however, is not just a metaphor of reversal. It identifies an event: the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. For Paul, it is through the cross of Jesus Christ that the old cosmos is crucified (Gal 6:14) and the new creation that exists out of this nothingness (6:15) only is ‘in Christ’ (3:28; 5:6; cf. 2:20; 4:16). As argued above, while Paul's language of justification is scripturally sourced and occasionally situated, the origin of his antithetical grammar is christological. Similarly, as he retells the histories of Israel, the Galatians and himself, the caesura is always christological. Paul's apostleship is ‘through Jesus Christ’ (1:1), and he received the gospel ‘through a revelation of Jesus Christ’ (1:12). It is this event that interrupts his past and recreates him as a preacher of the gospel: ‘But when God . . . was pleased to reveal his son to me’ (1:13–24). The Galatians’ time of ignorance and enslavement ends with Paul's proclamation, an instance of ‘hearing’ that makes present the crucified Christ (3:1–5; 4:13–14).Footnote ⁶⁶ Israel's captivity under the law was an imprisonment ‘until faith came’ – that is, ‘until Christ’ (3:23–5).

For Paul, however, Christ does not just contradict and crucify the old; he is the gift that creates the new. The deep grammar of the gospel, the incongruity and creativity of grace, is seen most sharply at the point of radical cosmological and anthropological discontinuity. The old cosmos ends; the old ἄνθρωπος dies. But there is, to borrow from the Song of Songs, a ‘love as strong as death’ (Song of Sol 8:6). As Barclay writes, ‘at the human level, the Christ-event is a matter of discontinuity’; it is ‘God's counter-statement to the previous conditions of the possible’ and ‘narrates disjunction, not progress’.Footnote ⁶⁷ The discontinuity, to use Pauline language, is as deep as death. But as Paul's antithetical grammar signals, there is also a reversal as radical as resurrection: from immaturity and captivity to adoption (3:19–4:1–7), from ignorance to being known (4:8–9), from sin to righteousness (2:16–21), from slavery to freedom (4:21–5:1), from the crucifixion of the old cosmos to new creation (6:14–15), from death to life (2:19–20). For the old ἄνθρωπος, in Martyn's metaphor, there are ‘no through trains from’ the old cosmos ‘to the gospel of God's son’.Footnote ⁶⁸ The old ἄνθρωπος does not survive his or her own salvation; She or he dies (2:20). But the gospel gives a gift to the dead – this is its full incongruity. And the gospel also gives a gift that makes alive – this is its full creativity. The old ἄνθρωπος dies, but the gospel of Chirst says, in the words of the novelist Walker Percy, ‘I love you dead.’Footnote ⁶⁹

This love has a surprising way of holding together the histories it also fractures. For Paul, this love is enacted in the self-giving of Christ, the ‘one who loved me and gave himself for me’ (2:20). It is this christological gift that Paul calls ‘the grace of God’ (2:21). This ‘grace of God’, however, also fulfils the promise of God (3:8, 14, 16) and accomplishes the purpose of God (note the ἵνα-clauses in 3:22, 24; 4:5). ‘The Christ-gift is’ thus, as Barclay puts it, ‘both entirely congruous with the promise of God and wholly incongruous with the prior conditions of human . . . history’.Footnote ⁷⁰ But, as love and gift, it is not wholly incongruous with the human. That Christ ‘loved me and gave himself for me’ gestures towards a continuity of the self, not in the sense that the ‘I’ lives, but in that the ‘I’ is loved – with a love ‘strong as death’. There is, for Paul, a ‘me’ that is killed, but this ‘me’ is the one whom Christ loved and gave himself for (2:20). There is an ‘us’ whose deliverance from ‘the present evil age’ goes through death, but this ‘us’ names those for whom ‘Christ gave himself’ (1:4).Footnote ⁷¹ The grace of God is there before Paul's former life, just as the promise to Abraham that includes Israel and the Gentiles (3:8, 14) ‘pre-preaches the gospel’ (3:8). These histories, then, broken into before and after by the advent of Christ, also have Christ as their beginning and end.

This grammar patterns the paradigmatic account of the ‘I’ in Galatians 2:20. The biography of the ‘I’ is both broken into two and connected through the incongruous and creative gift of Christ. The ‘I’ dies (‘I no longer live’), yet there is life out of this death: ‘the life I live in the flesh I live by faith’. What fractures this story of the self is the cross of Christ (‘I have been crucified with Christ’), and yet the life out of death is also christological: ‘Christ lives in me.’ For Paul, this evokes a dialectical confession: I no longer live, but I am loved. The hermeneutical function of the ‘not, but’ grammar of Galatians 2:16 is traceable here as this christological death and life is articulated as an antithesis: ‘I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.’ Death and life with and in Christ is ‘not, but’: it is not I, but Christ. And this, in Galatians, is the grammar of the gospel: a no to all that is not Christ, and a yes to only Christ. This antithetical grammar, as the reformers insisted, functions as both a critical and hermeneutical criterion: it identifies and negates any ‘other gospel’ even as it picks out and proclaims ‘the gospel of Christ’. The ‘no’ here is death – ‘I no longer live.’ But: there is a ‘love as strong as death’, a love for ‘me’, a love that says, incongruously, ‘I love you dead’, and a love that says, creatively, ‘Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead.’