There is neither Judaean nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.
~Galatians 3:28
If you have attended church in the last decade you know this particular verse has become a cudgel of rebuke against the fictional sin of “racism.” Dr. Rumburg, in a little book which should be air-dropped over every church in the land, has demolished the Alienist pretext for this “Raping [of] Sacred Scripture.” But as witnessed in Apologia Radio’s recent trainwreck of a podcast, Jeff Durbin & co. continue using this verse as the centerpiece of their argument for the abolishment of distinction, as if it hasn’t been completely demolished. Though Rumburg’s ironclad rebuke has gone unheeded, the opposition seems to have taken the dilemma to heart in such a way that they are compelled only to further radicalism. If, they conclude, we cannot validate miscegenation from this text without also granting the legitimacy of female ministers, “gay marriage,” and every other shade of androgyny, as well as abolition of the employer/employee relationship, the erasure of borders and families, and the total leveling of society, then so be it.
This is the same dilemma they face in defining “unequally yoked” (2 Cor.6:14; Deut. 22:10): if in order to allow people of radically disparate languages, cultures, and races to marry, they have to grant pedophilia with it, they would rather do so than preclude miscegenation.
And it is this second-wave radicalization which prompts my words now.
As the maxim goes, “A text without context is a pretext for a proof text.” The egalitarian resolve on Galatians 3:28 flies in the face of the context laid down just prior: “For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:26, emphasis mine), which establishes that the unity intended there is in accord with that Reformational pillar, sola fide, faith alone; and therefore, emphatically not a unity of nation, race, gender, and class.
The myopic focus on verse 28 in total disregard of verse 26 is an inversion of the orthodox hermeneutic of analogia de fide which holds that Scripture interprets Scripture, the less clear passages being illuminated by the more clear. It is an inversion because Alienism insists that in this case, the less clear must define the more clear. And that assertion of the primacy of an opaque text does no small violence upon the clearer portions.
For instance, we read in Joel 2:29 on the subject of the Christian age: “And also upon the servants and upon the handmaids in those days will I pour out my spirit.”
Does that sound like the prophet Joel understood the Christian era to ring in an abolition of class? Just the opposite, he assures us that classes remain distinct, though sharing in a spiritual unity. None other.
Furthermore, it is precisely this matter which the Jerusalem council was convened to settle — the nature and implications of the nations’ unity with Israelite believers. Whereof we read:
And when there had been much disputing, Peter rose up, and said unto them, Men and brethren, ye know how that a good while ago God made choice among us, that the Gentiles by my mouth should hear the word of the gospel, and believe.
And God, which knoweth the hearts, bare them witness, giving them the Holy Ghost, even as he did unto us;
And put no difference between us and them, purifying their hearts by faith.
Now therefore why tempt ye God, to put a yoke upon the neck of the disciples, which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear?
But we believe that through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ we shall be saved, even as they.’
(Acts 15:7-11)
This passage is one of those clearer segments by which the less clear of Galatians 3:28 is crystallized, and this cross-informing is indispensable to the coherence of revelation itself. The alternative to a univocal revelation is a self-contradictory one, which can reveal nothing reliably, except perhaps a god who is less than sovereign, and ultimately unintelligible. That is, the Alienist alternative to interpreting Galatians 3:28 in light of other more didactic portions addressing the same issue, is denotative of some other deity — either a pagan shade or man’s ego. Either way, though, due to its preclusion of the real omnipotent and self-revelatory God of scripture, it bespeaks a functional atheism.
So then, if the Kinist understanding alone renders no damage to either text and uniquely preserves the concept of unified revelation, it is the only approach to the issue which does not operate on presuppositions hostile to Scripture itself. The sense in which there is ‘neither Judaean nor Greek’ (Gal. 3:28) is that all ‘believe’ on the same gospel (Acts 15:7), and have received the same Holy Ghost (Acts 15:8), ‘purifying our hearts by faith’ (Acts 15:9), and being ‘saved, even as they’ are (Acts 15:11). Which, again, is to say, sola fide.
Moreover, the pastoral epistles abound with admonishments to separate classes like old men, young men, old women, young women, children, masters, and slaves to different duties relative to their stations and identities. So too does Paul everywhere distinguish between ethnic groups — even the very Judaeans and Greeks whom he references in Galatians 3:28. Fact is, the Alienist view condemns all these differentiations — even the very title of the epistle in which that verse appears. For the Galatians were a colony of ethnic Gauls settled in Greco-Anatolia whom Paul saw fit to acknowledge as a separate group amidst the Greeks. The contemporary equivalent to which might be an encyclical addressed to Anglo-Saxon America, a thing which our modern churchmen would, under the present zeitgeist, no doubt deem heretical in the extreme.
By this point it should be clear that the eisegetical impositions of Alienism touch far more than matters of race, nation, gender, and class: predicated upon a denial of the foundational hermeneutic of analogia de fide, the Alienist implicitly denies the orthodox view of plenary revelation as perfectly consistent in all its parts. Which in turn presupposes a very different sort of god than the Almighty.
Their controlling assumption of an egalitarian social theory undermines the basic Christian doctrine of revelation and theology proper. And with these foundations cleft from beneath it, no Christian soteriology is retained as an internally conflicted or incoherent testament would be, at best, the stammering efforts of a mutable and. therefore, unreliable god. This is the deity which Alienism implicitly posits — one capable of being neither a perfect executor of justice, nor an authoritative redeemer. So we see that the Alienist interpretation of Galatians 3:28 actually forfeits the gospel. As the old poet says, ‘For want of a nail, the Kingdom was lost.’
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