Fall 2024 · Vol. 53 No. 2 · pp. 201–203
Book Review
Freedom from Religiosity and Judgmentalism: Studies in Paul’s Letter to the Galatians
Mark D. Baker. Luminaire Studies. Winnipeg, MB: Kindred, 2023. 253 pages.
Mark Baker is an accomplished theologian, a missionary with experience at teaching in small circles of believers, many with little schooling, and a writer with a gift of clarity and accessibility. His commentary on Galatians had its birth in the Honduran church and has since been honed in many Latin American and North American settings, including the Fresno County Jail.
The commentary contains twelve chapters, the first two establishing the context in Galatia, as well as the lenses through which Baker p. 202 will consider Paul’s letter. The remaining chapters are each helpfully divided into The Text (the NIV 2011), The Flow and Form of the Text, The Text Explained, Implications of the Text for Today, and finally Personal Reflection Questions. In addition, Baker provides excellent mini essays on central topics such as Grace, Justification, Works of the Law, In Christ, Law, Holistic Gospel, and New Creation. A bibliography concludes the volume. The format thus lends itself to both personal and group study. With analogies drawn from everyday life, Baker is able to explain the likely context of the setting in which and in response to which Paul writes, as well as to create links to the experience of readers.
Baker copiously uses scholars such as John Barclay and especially Richard Hays. He is informed by the “New Perspective” on Paul most often associated with James Dunn and N. T. Wright. But the most determinative lenses through which he reads Galatians are, one, the honor/shame dynamic and, two, the bounded-set, fuzzy-set, and centered-set characterization of church (21–34). The latter Baker draws from his fellow missionary and scholar Paul Hiebert. Having recently published Centered-Set Church: Discipleship and Community Without Judgmentalism (IVP Academic 2021), Baker here makes that his hermeneutical key throughout the commentary.
In Baker’s reading of Galatians, Paul employs a centered-set vision of the church, centered on Jesus through whom God’s grace comes to humanity as a gracious gift, over against a bounded-set notion of the church employed by his Jewish Christian fellow missionaries, one secured by the boundaries of correct religious behavior (rules of eating, circumcision). Honor and shame are found or lost based on compliance with such demands, leading to the inclusion of those deemed worthy (Jews and Judaized Gentiles) and the exclusion and shaming of those unworthy (Gentile believers). Baker deliberately chooses to define this as “religion.” Religion is one of the powers that enslave persons and communities. In contrast, Paul’s gospel is one of freedom from such slavery, a freedom found “in Christ” (a characteristic Pauline turn of phrase) and lived out in community. This community’s identity is not secured by boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, nor is it characterized by inclusion that makes few if any demands, but by being centered on Jesus and lived out in communal love and hospitality to those on the margins.
Readers will learn much by employing this set of lenses, most especially if they can see themselves and their church communities through them. At the same time, there are cautions to be sounded: first, by defining religion throughout the commentary in uniformly negative terms, and then identifying bounded-set religiosity with Jewish Christian missionaries attempting to enforce Jewish practices on Gentiles, it becomes too p. 203 easy to see Judaism as “religion,” and thus slavery, and Christianity as the solution to Jewishness. Grace, reconciliation, and freedom replace law, works-righteousness, and judgmentalism. Despite his warnings that Christians too are prone to religion, has Baker sufficiently weighed the effects of identifying Jews and Jewishness with religion in such starkly negative terms on a readership predisposed to pitting Paul against Judaism?
Relatedly, Baker might have highlighted Paul’s polemics in Galatians more. It appears that Baker uses “religion” in much the way he suggests Paul uses “law” in Galatians. The negative depiction of the law, Baker rightly perceives, is not so much Paul’s fundamental view of the law as it is a debating tactic, a feature of his polemic against the “Judaizers” (43, 142–44). But many Christians take Paul “straight up,” as they do his characterization of his Jewish opponents and their views, without sufficiently taking his polemical rhetoric into account. This has contributed to stereotyping Judaism as a law-bound “works-religion” and, just as fatefully, to downgrading the demand for practiced justice/righteousness as works-righteousness and thus an attack on grace. Paul would have none of it (see Rom 6), nor does Baker (e.g., 202). Greater awareness of the polemical exaggeration in Paul’s rhetoric might aid in averting such misinterpretation.
Such cavils aside, this reviewer is grateful to Baker for skillfully and sensitively inviting readers into a rich encounter with this great letter and its brilliant prophet-writer. His commentary is perfectly suited for personal study and church groups.
