Galatians 3, the Land, and the Abrahamic Covenant: What Was Paul Thinking? (Pt.2)

I’m going out of town again for a few days, and, what with Christmas and everything, I don’t expect to be posting much till the New Year.  I wanted to finish this topic off with this post, but I’ve actually become a little engrossed in it, so expect at least one more effort.

Part One here

Grover Gunn is sure that Paul is quoting Genesis 13:15-17 and 17:8, 10 from the Septuagint to make his argument in Galatians 3:16.  There is no evidence that Paul is quoting the LXX.  As for which particular passages he is citing, one cannot be that exact.  I. Howard Marshall (New Testament Theology, 226) thinks Paul is citing Gen. 22:18 in Galatians 3:16.  Daniel P. Fuller thinks it’s Gen. 17:7 (The Unity of the Bible, 335-336).  I tend to think he has the Abrahamic narrative itself in mind.

But Paul is well aware of the ambiguity residing in the word “seed.”  So how can he relate it to Christ in Gal. 3:16 and yet preserve the collective meaning he knows is clearly there in the original contexts he is citing?  As Gal. 3:29 makes clear, Paul has not lost sight of the collective meaning of the word, but as was alluded to last time, and as I shall try to explain, the corporate is included by Paul in the One – Jesus Christ.  To Paul’s mind, fulfillment was always understood to require Christ the Fulfiller.  Once this is acknowledged one must choose between several hermeneutical options:

Option 1. Paul was employing some kind of semi-apocalyptic interpretation through which he could summon any OT passage to take on a new meaning in his argument.

This is the position of Richard B. Hays in e.g., The Conversion of the Imagination: Paul as Interpreter of Israel’s Scripture.  Since it posits a change of meaning under the influence of Paul’s supposed hermeneutic, it has not caught on with many conservative evangelicals.

Option 2. Though he never said it, Paul intended us to infer that the Genesis texts he referred to (whichever ones they were) had intended meanings beyond those found on the surface of the passages in their original setting.  Paul was only now declaring to us what God meant by those OT promises.

This would be Gunn’s position, along with all those who believe the NT is necessary to rightly interpret the Old.  A clear implication of this position is that there is hermeneutical, or at least linguistic discontinuity between the two Testaments.  The meaning of a particular term or phrase in the original context without recourse to the NT would procure a different sense than it would once the NT was consulted.  Another outcome of this approach would be to separate the original author’s intended meaning from that of the Holy Spirit.  While this possibility should not be ignored, the burden of proof for such a claim is on those who make it, whether they are aware of it or have to be made aware of it by others.

Option 3. Paul understood that “seed” could not be legitimately confined to a singular noun referring to Messiah, since the word is a collective noun and is used as such many times in the OT, and, indeed, by Paul himself (Gal. 3:29).  In which case the singular and the corporate must be closely related; the corporate fulfillment being predicated on the coming Messiah.

Only this view preserves the integrity of the OT contexts, not to mention the specificity of God’s covenant promises to Israel.  Promises which Paul elsewhere says are inviolable (Rom. 11:25-28).  Only on this view can we avoid the treacherous waters of hermeneutical and philosophical ambiguity upon which the first two views implicitly rely.  This third way would be our position.  To demonstrate it one must try to show that there is no need for an OT passage to be considered a “shadow” or “type” of a NT reality, but rather that the witness of both Testaments can be hermeneutically aligned to allow all the relevant verses to speak in their own words.

Paul’s Argument in Galatians 3:1-16

If we take a look at Galatians 3 we will find Paul reasoning about the role of faith in God’s saving economy.  We will not find him saying anything about God’s covenants with the people of Israel and the land grant God promised them.  Of course, Gunn realizes this.  His contention is that because the Apostle speaks of OT texts which not refer to Christ as the “Seed” (e.g. Gen 17:7), but also contain promises about the “land,” it only stands to reason that the word “Seed” in Genesis (and the rest of the OT?) is not in fact a reference to the nation of Israel (“descendents”), but only ever to Christ; and the “land” likewise is not Canaan (or the portion described in Gen. 15), but Heaven (some would say the whole land surface of Earth).  What the Apostle has done, so the thinking goes, is to offer an inspired interpretation of terminology only dimly understood before Paul wrote Galatians circa 50 A.D. (see Option 2 above).