Title
“Sons, Seed, and Children of Promise in Galatians: Discerning the Coherence in Paul’s Model of Abrahamic Descent”
Abstract
The central portion of Paul’s letter to the Galatians consists of three main arguments, each of which invokes a different image of Abrahamic descent: sons (3:7) in 3:6–14, seed (3:16, 29) in 3:15–4:11, and children of promise (4:28) in 4:21–5:1. Current interpretations of these Abrahamic appeals typically portray them as logically problematical, collectively inconsistent, and/or generally unpersuasive, a situation that then leads most scholars to identify them as ad hoc responses to the Galatian agitators. This inability to find a coherent model of Abrahamic descent in Galatians, however, threatens to undermine the very gospel itself by suggesting that it cannot effectively counter a Judaizing call that derives from a simple appeal to Abraham.
This dissertation argues that Paul does indeed present the Galatians with a coherent account of Abrahamic descent that accords with his persuasive intent of refuting a law–based circumcision. Its key insight lies in the suggestion that Paul understands the Abrahamic diatheke in 3:15–18 as akin to a Hellenistic adoptive testament. As a result, the promised Abrahamic seed must be both a son of Abraham and, because of Abraham’s divine adoption through the diatheke, a son of God, hence Paul’s identification of Christ as Abraham’s sole seed (3:16).
This twofold nature of the Abrahamic seed then suggests a distinction in Paul’s other terms for Abrahamic descent. The dissertation accordingly contends that “sons of Abraham” in 3:7 designates, as it typically did in the mid–first century C.E., the Jews, i.e., those physical descendants of Abraham who also share his faith. In contrast, “children of promise” in 4:28 designates gentiles who have through faith received the Abrahamic blessing, i.e., the Spirit of sonship that makes them children of God. Each group thus requires incorporation into Christ to establish their status as Abrahamic seed: the Jews so that they might share in the gentiles’ divine sonship, the gentiles so that they might share in the Jews’ Abrahamic sonship. This interdependent union of the Jewish sons of Abraham and the gentile sons of God in Christ then constitutes the single divine Abrahamic seed who inherits (3:29).
Paul employs this model to refute the necessity of law observance as follows. In 3:6–14, he argues that Christ’s accursed death on the cross divides faith from law observance as a means of justification for Jews; the full sons of Abraham accordingly become those Jews who, by dying to the law and embracing Christ, exhibit the same radical trust in God as their forefather exhibited. In 3:15–4:11, he argues that God added the law and its curse to ensure that the Jews could not receive the Abrahamic blessing promised to the nations—i.e., the Spirit that would make the Jews sons of God and, thus, Abrahamic seed—apart from the one Christ. Finally, in 4:21–5:1, he argues that the two types of Abrahamic sonship established by Hagar and Sarah correspond paradigmatically to the enslaved sonship that results from the non–adoptive Sinaitic diatheke’s inability to free the Jews from their human enslavement to the stoicheia and to the free sonship that results from the Christian Jews’ divine adoption through the Abrahamic diatheke. Each appeal to Abraham thus demonstrates the Christian Jews’ freedom from the law, thereby undermining the gentile Christians’ potential motive for coming under law.
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