Abstract
Paul’s Letter to the Galatians is known as a bitter defence of his “true” gospel of faith against opponents who wish to impose their “false” gospel of works on the faith community. This focus on the faith-works controversy has not been conducive to attempts to read it in terms of the notion of love. This article seeks to reconsider this position and to spell out the special role of love in the letter and its transformative nature. In a first section, the approach to the theme is explained. After a discussion of the polemical nature of the letter, the article analyses Paul’s presentation of divine love in the letter as the origin of God’s salvific and transformative action and of love as a divine characteristic, and how divine love marks the identity of the believing community. The significance of love in the ethos and ethics of the faith community is spelled out.
Highlights
Biblical Spirituality and Spiritual Hermeneutics,1 as its subdiscipline, assume and build on historical-critical approaches
Whilst Schneiders has not developed the notion of transformation in detail, it is to the credit of Waaijman (2002:427-442) that he presented a well-designed model of transformation as a key element in spirituality
In Galatians, Paul discusses love in terms of his own faith experience. Faith meant that he experienced a transformation in love
Summary
Biblical Spirituality and Spiritual Hermeneutics, as its subdiscipline, assume and build on historical-critical approaches. This has special value for the interpretation of Biblical texts In this article, his notion of transformation in love, as one of the five dimensions of Waaijman’s model, will provide a methodological tool with which to analyse the textual information in Galatians. Romans 12-13 offers the closest example of the important role of love in Paul’s thought, but it is decisively different in the way that it links the love motif with other virtues and themes This is one reason to approach any discussion of love first and foremost in terms of a particular letter of Paul before trying to reconstruct an overview that may not be supported by the textual evidence.
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