‘For freedom Christ has set us free’: The Gospel of Paul versus the Custodial Oversight of the Law and Human Philosophies

 

Introduction

The culmination of Paul’s argument in Galatians, and particularly from 3.1-4.31, is: ‘For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery’ (Galatians 5.1). This essay seeks to understand Paul’s opposition to a continuing custodial role for the Law and a use of human philosophies to deal with sinful passions and desires.  His arguments against these are found in Galatians and Colossians.  By focussing on the problem of the Law and of philosophy, we can better understand Paul’s theology.  He believed that the Gospel was the only way to deal with sin not simply in terms of our actions but more basically in terms of our sinful desires and passions of the flesh.

The task ahead is to understand several large-scale matters in Paul’s theology, those having to do with a right understanding of the human plight and a right understanding of God’s solution.  So much Protestant theology has articulated this in terms of sin and justification, and this, once justification is understood properly as both ‘justifying the sinner’ and ‘making the sinner righteous’, can get to the heart of the matter.  However, I would argue that Paul’s understanding might better be articulated as follows:

·       the human plight is a bondage to both sinful acts and the sinful desires that produce them;

·       God’s solution is both a forgiveness of sins or justification of the sinner and an inward transformation in Christ and through the Holy Spirit. 

The problem and solution are moral, not just juridical.  The moral solution is not in custodial oversight and regulations but in the person and work of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.  If we misunderstand Paul on these matters, we end up with a view of the Christian life as one of a sinner continuing in sin but forgiven by God’s grace.  This is only partly true, but it misses the deeper truths that Paul is at pains to explain and that I hope to articulate with a look at Galatians and Colossians together.

Galatians

In Galatians 4.1-2, Paul compares life under the Law to the life of a son who, though he is the ‘owner of everything’ remains ‘under guardians and managers until the date set by his father’.  The underage son had no rights but, like a slave, was under the hand of the father.  In fact, the paidagōgos that Paul mentions in Galatians 3.24-25 as equivalent to the Law was a slave.  The slave was, in some regard, was for a time above the future heir.

The nature of sonship was first introduced into the theological argument in Galatians 3.7.  The status of an underage son, not just the role of the slave who has been entrusted with his care, is in view a few verses later in Galatians 4.1-7:

I mean that the heir, as long as he is a child, is no different from a slave, though he is the owner of everything, ² but he is under guardians and managers until the date set by his father. ³ In the same way we also, when we were children, were enslaved to the elementary principles [stoicheia] of the world. ⁴ But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, ⁵ to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. ⁶ And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” ⁷ So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who lived in the latter part of the first century BC, argued that Roman law was far stronger than Greek law in the power that a father could exercise over a son.  Going back in time to the origins of Rome, he described the laws enacted by Romulus for the Romans:

But the lawgiver of the Romans gave virtually full power to the father over his son, even during his whole life, whether he thought proper to imprison him, to scourge him, to put him in chains and keep him at work in the fields, or to put him to death, and this even though the son were already engaged in public affairs, though he were numbered among the highest magistrates, and though he were celebrated for his zeal for the commonwealth (Roman Antiquities 2.26.4).[1]

Dionysius even says that the law gave ‘greater power to the father over his son than to the master over his slaves’ (2.27.1).  The father could even sell his son three times.  Once sold, the son might regain his freedom only to be sold again by his father.  (After three times, the son would be considered free.)

While a very ancient custom or law among the Romans, Dionysius says, this law of paternity was reaffirmed when it was recorded in the Twelve Tables (in the fourth table) (2.27.4) in the mid-5^th c. BC.  Dionysius’ point is that this and other such laws are ancient and foundational for the Roman people.  He refers to them as ‘ancestral customs and laws’ (tous patrious ethismous te kai nomous).  I suggest that this gets at the meaning of ‘stoicheia’ in Galatians.

The Galatian church was at fault for returning to live under the authority of the Law, such as the law of circumcision or the observance of days, months, seasons, and years (4.10; 5.2, 6, 11-12; 6.12-15).  These are Jewish laws and customs, but Paul includes Gentile converts in regard to such when he says, ‘Formerly, when you did not know God, you were enslaved to those that by nature are not gods’ (4.8).  Such fundamental customs and laws Paul calls stoicheia, which the ESV translates as ‘elementary principles’ (4.3, 9; cf. Colossians 2.8, 20) having been set free from the elemental customs and laws that guided and controlled a person.

Why would a person—or someone teaching others—want to reintroduce the Law?  The issue was not a desire on the part of some to be Jewish and to make Gentile converts live under Jewish laws.  Paul’s argument does, of course, have to do with the Law, but his more general reference to the stoicheia under which both Jews and Gentiles lived means that the issue is more than Jewishness, or separating Christians from Jewish particularity (food laws, circumcision, Jewish calendrical observances).  The issue was that children need guidance and control; they need law.  The issue was ethical, not cultural or ethnic.  The reason for turning back to the Law was that those promoting the Law for Christians hoped to introduce the sort of ancient oversight that some were arguing control human passions and desires.  He writes, ‘Why then the law? It was added because of transgressions...’ (Galatians 3.19a).  One of the errors of the so-called New Perspective on Paul was to focus on the ethnic element in the view of Paul’s opponents rather than the moral point at issue.  Both sides were attempting to answer the question, ‘How do we deal with sin?’  The opponents reintroduced the Law as a custodian. Paul had no issue with the moral teaching of the Law; his concern was that seeing the Law as a moral custodian of sinners totally undermined the Gospel.  It denied the effectiveness of Christ’s death and the power of the Spirit in believers’ lives.

Thus, the reason that Paul so opposed a return to the childlike existence of being under the Law was that the Law failed to help people control their sinful desires.  His understanding of Christian freedom was that it did not simply free Christians from the Law but that Christ and the Spirit solved the problem of sinful desire.  Much of the argument that Paul makes in Galatians is toward this point.  He says,

For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. ²⁰ I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. ²¹ I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose (Galatians 2.19-21).

 Later, Paul says, 

And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires (Galatians 5.24).

 A few verses earlier, Paul said, ‘But I say to you, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh’ (5.16).  The next verse, taken on its own, can easily be misinterpreted.  It stands as the equivalent of a longer passage in Romans 7.7-25, which is misinterpreted more often than not.  In neither text is Paul saying that the state of the Christian is in constant tension between wanting to do what is right but failing to do so because of the power of sin.  Rather, Paul’s point is that, without Christ, people are in such a state.  They also have the Law, but it is powerless to change them.  Instead, all the Law does for sinners is point out their sin.  The Gospel Paul preaches is release from this bondage to sin, the Law, and death and freedom in Christ and the Holy Spirit. 

 In Romans, Paul follows his description of the human condition outside of Christ in 7.7-25 with his description of the believer’s situation in Christ and the Spirit in 8.1-17 (or all the way through the end of the chapter, v. 39).  In Galatians 5.17, Paul acknowledges the opposition between the desires of the flesh and the Spirit, with the result that one in such a situation does not do what he wishes.  Paul’s answer was already stated in the previous verse: ‘walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh’, and he repeats this in the following verse, ‘But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law’.  The Law, like the slave custodian, is there to control the child.  One needs no such custodian when the Spirit leads.  The contrast is not only between the Law and the Spirit but also between the sinful desires and the Spirit.  When the Spirit replaces the desires of the flesh, the Law is no longer needed to guide transgressors.

 Colossians

 At this point, we might introduce the somewhat related letter of Colossians.  Whether Paul is more concerned about a Gentile or a Jewish teaching that undermined Christian teaching in this letter, his is, once again, addressing an issue of believers thinking that they need to live under some authorities other than Christ.  As with the Galatians, the Colossians wished to introduce some teaching to control sinful passions and desires.  In this letter, however, the problem involves, at least in part, the idea that philosophy may be the answer.  As in Galatians, Paul speaks of the stoicheia that offer an alternative to Christ for the control of desire.  In this letter, however, they have to do with philosophy.  Instead of Jewish Law, can philosophy control human desire that leads one to sin?

 Paul’s response to this was, ‘No’.  He said, 

See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ (Colossians 2.8).

 Whereas the ESV translates stoicheia with ‘elemental principles’ in Galatians, it translates the word with ‘elemental spirits’ in Colossians.  The thought is that such principles can be personalised, and that in Colossians the thought is more to do with the spiritual powers called thrones, dominions, rulers, and authorities in Colossians 1.16.  However, philosophy is one source for answering the question how people ought to live well.  People sought answers from philosophical teaching and in ancient laws of a people, and they believed that spiritual forces or beings stood behind their laws.

Paul mentions the stoicheia both in 2.8 (above) and again in 2.20: 

If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations….

This verse indicates that, as in Galatians, Paul does still have the idea of laws in view.  Whatever these stoicheia are, they require submission to their regulations.  I will leave aside speculation at this time as to whether there is a personal side to these regulations that lies in Greek and Roman mythology, but Paul’s primary concern is to do with living under certain regulations.  He provides an example of what he means, asking why they submit to rules such as

Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch” ²² (referring to things that all perish as they are used)—according to human precepts and teachings? (Colossians 2.21-22).

What, then, is the connection between philosophy (2.8) and regulations (2.20)?  The answer is that in antiquity philosophy largely had to do with the regulation of life, and Paul dismisses philosophy in this regard.  For example, the Pythagoreans practiced self-control by looking at sumptuous food and not eating it (Diodorus Siculus, History 10.5.2), and they taught that indulging in the pleasures of love meant not being master of oneself (10.9.4).  Pythagoras called his principles not ‘wisdom’ but ‘love of wisdom’--philosophia (10.10.1; cf. Col. 2.8).  The Stoics opposed the Epicurean teaching that what is morally good is determined by the senses—in other words, that we should follow our desires and seek pleasure.  They condemned ‘men who are slaves to their appetites and their lusts’ (Seneca, Letters to Lucilius CXXIV.3, ‘On the True Good as Attained by Reason’).[2]  Instead of pleasure, the Stoics taught that reason, the mind not the senses, would guide people to what is truly good.  Seneca says, 

Reason, however, is surely the governing element in such a matter as this; as reason has made the decision concerning the happy life, and concerning virtue and honour also, so she has made the decision with regard to good and evil (Seneca, Letters to Lucilius CXXIV.4).

Such rules, claimed Paul, were entirely futile.  The reason was that the problem of sin lay deeper than in actions but lay in desires.  In Ephesians, Paul says,  

we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind (Ephesians 2.3).

In his letter to Titus, Paul repeats a similar statement regarding the human predicament:  

For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another (Colossians 3.3).

We can state Paul’s soteriology in terms of the problem of sinful acts and the solution of God’s justification of the sinner, but this neither touches the depths of Paul’s theology nor the connection it had to Jesus’ ethic of the heart.  The problem of the human condition for Paul was of sinful desires and passions that led to sinful acts, and the solution from God was to transform us in Christ and through the Holy Spirit.

This solution was diametrically opposed to submitting to philosophy just as much as to the Jewish Law.  In Plato’s work called Phaedo, this function of philosophy is clearly stated:  

And self-restraint—that which is commonly called self-restraint, which consists in not being excited by the passions and in being superior to them and acting in a seemly way—is not that characteristic of those alone who despise the body [68d] and pass their lives in philosophy?” (Phaedo 68c, d).[3]

Perhaps the key to Paul’s criticism of philosophy is the idea of Protagoras that virtue can be taught:

Seeing then that so much care is taken in the matter of both private and public virtue, do you wonder, Socrates, and make it a great difficulty, that virtue may be taught?’ (Plato, Protagoras 326e).[4]

 'Civic art' (the art of living well together), argued Protagoras, does not come naturally to society (322a and following; 323c). People need to be taught virtues and punished so as to deter them from vices like injustice, impiety, and whatever 'is opposed to civic virtue'. (323e-324a). Protagoras asks,

Or is there not, some one thing whereof all the citizens must needs partake, if there is to be a city?’ [and he answers] ‘justice and temperance and holiness—[325a] in short, what I may put together and call a man's virtue; and if it is this whereof all should partake and wherewith everyone should proceed to any further knowledge or action, but should not if he lacks it; if we should instruct and punish such as do not partake of it, whether child or husband or wife, until the punishment of such persons has made them better,[325b] and should cast forth from our cities or put to death as incurable whoever fails to respond to such punishment and instruction....’ (Protagoras 324e-325b).

Paul, on the other hand, criticises human precepts and teaching (Colossians 21-22).  In fact, in Ephesians Paul speaks of being ‘learning Christ and being ‘taught Christ’:

But that is not the way you learned Christ!— ²¹ assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, ²² to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, ²³ and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, ²⁴ and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness (Ephesians 4.20-24). 

 In Romans, Paul states the human problem as a debased mind, meaning persons given over to their passions (like homosexuals) so that they do not know natural from unnatural: 

And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to aa debased mind to do what ought not to be done (Romans 1.28).

The solution, worked out over many chapters, comes to this: a transformed mind.  Paul says, 

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect (Romans 12.2).[5]

 Yet this should not be misconstrued.  He does believe in ethics and teaching right and wrong (e.g., 1 Th. 4.1ff).  His criticism is that there is a need for life in Christ to infuse in believers Christian virtues.  The power of Christ, not regulations about what to handle, taste, or touch, is needed to conquer sin.  The point is one he made already to the Galatian church.

 Jesus had insisted that the rules and regulations of the scribes and Pharisees did not touch the human predicament of sin.  His ethic called for an ethic of the heart.  What Paul further articulated—and this dependent on teaching in the Old Testament, such as Isaiah 59.20-21, Jeremiah 31.31-34, and Ezekiel 36.24-27—was that only God could transform the heart.  The New Covenant that replaced the Old Covenant was about this divine transformation of the inner being such that the righteous commandments of God might be obeyed.

 In Greek and Roman philosophy, discussion of the human problem in terms of an inward desire was common.  Yet the various philosophers believed that their philosophies could explain desire and teach how to control it.  In the century before Paul, Cicero, a Roman Stoic, wrote:

… while the whole field of philosophy is fertile and productive and no portion of it barren and waste, still no part is richer or more fruitful than that which deals with moral duties; for from these are derived the rules for leading a consistent and moral life (De Officiis 3.5).[6] 

Paul’s opposition to philosophy was that it was in fact unfertile and unproductive in leading to a consistent and moral life.  The Gospel was not a philosophy but was about Jesus Christ.  It offered not principles but a ‘power at work within us’ (Ephesians 3.20).  It was the ‘power of God for salvation to everyone who believes’ (Romans 1.16).

 Some sought the achievement of the Good Life through pleasure (Epicureans).  Some sought it through reason (Stoics).  Some sought it through the custodial care of the Jewish Law (the Jews and Paul’s Christian opponents).  Some sought it through obeying foundational laws and customs of a people (e.g., Dionysius of Halicarnassus).  For Christians, Paul argued, the Good Life is not something achieved in these ways but something worked in us by Christ Jesus through the Holy Spirit.  The human problem is far worse than other teachings acknowledged: we are under the control of our sinful passions and desires and cannot overcome them through custodial oversight of the Law or philosophical principles and laws.  We need divine help, and this has been given in Christ and the Spirit.  The Christian is not just a ‘believer’ but someone set free from bondage to the flesh, the Law trying to control the flesh, and the death that comes by disobeying the Law.  Having been set free, Paul says to Christians, ‘do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another’ (Galatians 5.3).

---

[1] Dionysius of Halicarnassus, The Roman Antiquities of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, trans. Earnest Cary (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937).

[2] Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Moral Letters to Seneca / Letters from a Stoic, trans. Richard Mott Gummere (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1915).

[3] Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 1, trans. Harold North Fowler; Introduction by W.R.M. Lamb (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1966).

[4] Plato, Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 3, trans. W.R.M. Lamb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967).

[5] Romans 7.7-25, I would argue, is about the person living under the Law trying to tame desire.  Romans 8.1-17 answers this problem with the solution in Christ and through the Holy Spirit.

[6] M. Tullius Cicero. De Officiis, trans. Walter Miller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1913).

The Cross of Christ and the Love of God

 

God’s love is not the toleration, acceptance, welcoming, or inclusion of my ‘otherness’.  It is not the celebration of my contribution to ‘diversity’.  It is not God’s preferential treatment of those who are or claim to be victims, a rescuing of the already righteous.

Romans 5.1-11 explains God’s love as peace with Him through our Lord Jesus Christ, the granting of access to His grace, justification of the sinner by the blood of Christ, salvation from God’s wrath, and reconciliation to God by the death of His Son.  God’s love recognises in us no worthiness, for we are deserving of His wrath.  It is sacrificial, paying the penalty demanded by justice for the justification of the unjust.  It is a conferring on the sinner with nothing to offer in his defense the verdict of ‘no condemnation’ and the gift of reconciliation to God.

Our Christian life begins in the waters of baptism with a recognition that our unrighteousness needs forgiveness and cleansing.  In Christ’s death for our sins, we die to our sin.  In Christ’s resurrection from the grave to life, we are raised to new life.  Paul writes,

Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? ⁴ We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life (Romans 6.3-4).

God’s love treats us as sinners, not victims.  It has nothing to do with God recognising in us some dignity, worthiness, or contribution that we bring into His presence or to the community.  It is not exhausted in some vague virtue that can be found in various religions, such as in showing hospitality to strangers, giving alms to the needy, and showing grace to others.  In these is some reflection of God’s love.  Yet God’s love is so much more and something only stated in Christian teaching, that Christ died for sinners.

We know what it is like to feel compassion for the suffering and want justice for the victim.  We might even call that love.  Yet God’s love is proffered to the sinner while yet a sinner.  Paul says, ‘God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us’ (Romans 5.8).  How is this divine love?  It is love for the sinner that removes the guilt of sin and transforms the sinful character of the sinner.  Paul says, ‘those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires’ (Galatians 5.24).

To know God’s love is to understand Christ upon the cross.  He did not hang on the cross to show to what lengths He would go, even to die, for another.  That He did, but it is not why He died on the cross.  He died for our sins: ‘He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world’ (1 John 2.2).  As Peter says, Jesus’ death was the payment of a ransom ‘with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot’ (1 Peter 1.18-19).

God’s love expressed in Jesus’ death on the cross reveals two things at once.  It reveals our utter unworthiness and sinfulness before a holy God.  Our state was such that only Christ’s death could save us.  It simultaneously reveals God’s character in that His love is sacrificial love.  As our sacrificial lamb, Christ is Himself pure and we are ourselves impure.  Sacrificial love is love that forgives us our sins and cleanses us from all unrighteousness (1 John 1.9).  God’s love is only fully revealed in the cross.

The Paidagōgos in Galatians 3.24-25: The Law as a Custodian until the Coming of Faith

 

The question asked by exegetes of Galatians 3.24-25 is whether paidagōgos carries a negative and disciplinary meaning, whether it is more neutral, or whether it is even positive?  Is Paul saying that the Law was a disciplinarian, a guardian or custodian, or a tutor (or schoolmaster)?  Furthermore, what are the implications of the choice in translation?

The ESV renders Galatians 3.23-26 as follows:

Now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. ²⁴ So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith. ²⁵ But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, ²⁶ for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith.

The NIV and NET Bible (2^nd ed.) translators also chose ‘guardian’.  Similarly, the NJB follows the notion of ‘custodian’, rendering the verses with a phrase: ‘a slave to look after us’.  The NRSV, on the other hand, uses the word ‘disciplinarian’.  Of theological significance for Martin Luther, the Lutheran Bible has ‘Zuchtmeister’, or ‘disciplinarian’.  The role of the Law, then, is negative.  On the opposite spectrum, the KJV has the positive notion of ‘schoolmaster’, and the American Standard Version has ‘tutor’.

The solution to this question does not lie in discovering some new meaning of the word paidagōgos.  This common Greek word referred to a slave who had oversight of underage children.  The question is, what aspect of the role for a household slave overseeing children did Paul have in mind?  Was Paul emphasising how the Law was like a child-minder guarding children placed in his custody, how it disciplines the children, or how it serves as a tutor educating the children in their studies?  Was Paul’s thought that the Law’s purpose was negative (disciplinarian), positive (tutor), or more general (guard, custodian)?

To answer these questions, consider two things.  First, consider Plato’s similar discussion to Paul.  In Plato’s Lysis, a youth is being quizzed by Socrates about his paidagōgos:

And now there is one thing more you [the youth] must tell me. Do they [your parents] let you control your own self, or will they not trust you in that either? Of course they do not, he replied. But some one controls you? Yes, he said, my tutor [paidagōgos] here. Is he a slave? Why, certainly; he belongs to us, he said. What a strange thing, I exclaimed; a free man controlled by a slave! But how does this tutor actually exert his control over you? By taking me to school, I suppose, he replied. And your schoolmasters, can it be that they also control you?’ (Plato, Lysis 208c].[1]

In this passage, the translator chose ‘tutor’ to render paidagōgos.  This slave controls the youth.  He is not the schoolmaster, and despite how the word is translated, nothing is said about tutoring the youth.  Rather, the emphasis in the passage is on the slave’s control over the child in taking him to school.  Later in the work, the paidagōgos of the boys dialoguing with Socrates insist (in their foreign accents--they are slaves) that they go home as the hour was late (Lysis 223a).  They function more as a custodian or guardian, then, as the ESV, NIV, NET Bible, and JSB translate the word in Galatians, than as tutors.  Neither do these passages in Lysis nuance this guardianship in a negative direction to suggest any disciplinary role.

 A more detailed study of the paidagōgos could show how guardianship might at times be more positive or more negative.  A second consideration for understanding Paul’s point in this analogy, however, is that we need to look at the context in Galatians to understand what he means by the analogy.  In the immediate context, Galatians 3.23 uses two very similar and negative metaphors regarding the Law: it held us captive and imprisoned us.  The next two verses offer a third metaphor in paidagōgos.  This negativity, however, is not the point.  Paul uses these three metaphors for two purposes: to emphasise that one who is under the Law is not free, and to state that this is a temporary situation.  The captive or prisoner is in that state until the anticipated faith is revealed, and the youth under the custody of a slave (the Law) will be free when he grows up.

 I would suggest, then, that Paul does not have the notion of discipline in view but one’s not being free for a limited time under the Law.  When the youth reaches the right age, he is no longer under the slave’s guardianship.  For Paul, in Christ we are sons through faith (v. 26).  (This verse offers a strong reason to understand the ambiguous phrase ‘faith of Christ’ in Galatians and Romans as ‘faith in Christ’ and not the ‘faithfulness of Christ'.)  Paul continues with this notion of the underage son coming of age a few verses later at the beginning of chapter 4.  He says,

 

I mean that the heir, as long as he is a child, is no different from a slave, though he is the owner of everything, ² but he is under guardians [epitropous] and managers [oikonomous] until the date set by his father (Galatians 4.1-2).

 The notion of guardianship introduced with paidagōgos in 3.24-25 continues in 4.2 with the two other words noted in the brackets.  Again, Paul’s point is that being under the Law is being under someone else’s care until one grows up.  The point Paul is making is not that the Law disciplines us or tutors us but that it controls us.

This is also the point Plato was making.  The youth in the dialogue, Lysis, has ‘quite a large number of masters and controllers’ set over him by his father.  His mother prevents him from messing with her loom and, if he does, gives him a beating (208d).  Socrates then asks, ‘Why do they maintain you all day long in constant servitude to somebody, so that, in a word, you do hardly a single thing that you desire?’ (208e).  As with Paul, the child is like a slave.  Also as with Paul, Socrates references the fact that he has possessions but gets no advantage from them.  In other words, as Paul says, he is an heir but still underage.  Asked by Socrates why he is 'shepherded and managed' by another though so 'well-born', Lysis replies simply, ‘I am not yet of age’ (209a). 

Paul explains what he means in Galatians by being under the Law’s authority.  He works this idea in two ways.  First, he has in mind the sort of authority one is under as long as the Law persists in its custodial role.  He does not have the moral law in mind but the stoicheia or elemental principles (4.9) that, for Gentiles, meant slavery to the gods (4.8) and, for Jews, meant slavery in the observance of a religious calendar (days, months, seasons, years: 4.10) and circumcision (e.g., 5.2-3, 6, 11).

Second, Paul uses the notion of an heir coming of age to develop an understanding of Christian freedom as opposed to being under the custodianship of the Law.  In Galatians 4.21-31, Paul gives the allegory of the slave mother, Hagar, and the free mother, Sarah, thereby illustrating two types of existence: children in slavery to the Law and children of the promise who are free.  He declares that we are children of the free woman (4.31).  In Galatians 5.1, the next verse, he says, ‘For freedom Christ has set us free’ (5.1).  Galatians 5.13 marks a change in how Paul is using his metaphor, for he adds, ‘Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. ¹⁴ For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself”’ (Galatians 5.13-14).  

Paul further clarifies that being under the Law implies that one is also in a state of doing works of the flesh that continue to require the custodial work of the Law: ‘sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, ²⁰ idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, ²¹ envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these’ (Galatians 5.19-21).  The idea of a custodian is still in view with the phrase ‘under the Law’—like a paidagōgos, we may recall.  The custodian or guardian, the Law, tries to keep us from these things.  

Coming of age, however, one no longer needs the Law because the desires of the flesh that needed a custodian are replaced with the Spirit.  The opposing, inward drives do not remain a constant battle because the Christian is not driven by the flesh and in custody of the Law but is motivated by the Spirit and so is free (Galatians 5.16-18).  ‘And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires’ (5.24).  Those who are free have the fruit of the Spirit maturing in their lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5.22-23).  The Law is no longer the custodian of the Christian living in such maturity.  Paul concludes, ‘Against such there is no law’ (5.23b).

Paul has, of course, a different purpose in writing to the Galatians from Socrates' purpose in questioning Lysis.  The Galatians are undermining faith in Christ by their return to a childish existence and needing a paidagōgos in the Law.  Plato’s notion of coming of age was gaining knowledge and wisdom.  Paul’s notion of maturation away from the Law’s custody was the saving work of Christ and the transformative work of the Holy Spirit in one's life. Practically, Paul often uses the Law as a tutor, instructing believers in righteousness, and the Law can function in a disciplinary capacity when people act immorally (as we see Paul do a number of times in, e.g., 1 Corinthians 5-7).  Theologically, however, they should not live a childlike existence of needing a custodian, the Law, because they have matured beyond works of the flesh in their Spirit-led lives.  In Galatians, Paul's point is about the Law as a custodian--one no longer needed by mature Christians.

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[1] Plato, Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 8, trans. W.R.M. Lamb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955).

After the Woke University, Then What?: Lessons from the Azanian Project in Southern Africa

 

This essay is, for the most part, descriptive of what is called Azanian philosophy.  This philosophy offers, in my view, an excellent example of the tribalist thought that necessarily follows postmodern relativism and its social values of diversity, equity, and inclusion.  Azania is a name given to southeastern Africa from earlier times, and the new project of an Azanian social and political philosophy is a critical theory that intends to deconstruct ‘South African’ (the country’s name is problematic itself) identity from the time of its colonial inception.  It criticises the post-Apartheid developments in the country because the problem in Africa is far deeper than cultural conflict or economic disparity.  The paper follows the lengthy, detailed, and erudite article by Joel Modiri titled, ‘Azanian Political Thought and the Undoing of South African Knowledges’.[1] Modiri is an associate professor and the head of the Department of Jurisprudence at the University of Pretoria, and his paper attempts to offer a philosophical foundation for the sort of radicalism that we find in political activists in South Africa such as Julius Malema and his Economic Freedom Fighters (not mentioned in the paper).  As such, it articulates a post-postmodernist alternative philosophy to post-colonial movements in Africa.  It also offers a look at a challenge facing the university, not only in ‘Azania’ but or in Africa but also beyond the continent’s borders.  Amidst my abbreviated description of Modiri’s points, I will interject some of my own criticisms, which could be multiplied further.  My primary purpose, however, is to explore where the university might go next after wokism, if allowed to pursue a post-Christian, post-Enlightenment trajectory.

As Modiri explains, Azanianism[2] rejects

the ubiquitous valorisation of Western values, institutions, and knowledges (sic); taken-for-granted assumptions about the solidity, naturalness, and permanence of the South African state; a hegemonic ANC-centred narrative of history and politics; and uncritical acceptance of liberal multiracialism and moderate politics as entrenched in the post-1994 constitutional order.[3]

‘Azania’ is suggested as an alternative place name to South Africa.  The Azanian ‘five-fold itinerary’ involves:

1.     an advancing of the struggle for liberation in law, politics, and society

2.     critique and negate Western civilisation (colonialism, white supremacy, racial capitalism)

3.     an analytical focus and consciousness of race and racialisation

4.     an historical perception of South Africa’s negative history since colonialism

5.     a ‘restoration and reaffirmation of the political and cultural integrity of African, indigenous, and Black experiences and consciousness’.[4]

Whereas critical theory is ideological, this Azanian critical theory is deconstructive of Western civilisation and formulates an ideology around African identity.  Peculiarly, critical theory is Western, and the Azanian ideology is an imagined construct of African identity.  This is not contextualisation, not an attempt to recover some stage of some African culture or another, not an attempt to affirm a present African identity—as it claims.  It is a new construction of African identity by some vanguard of ‘Azanian philosophy’. 

This involves something along the lines of Western critical theory, but it is a different agenda from what we find with, say, Antonio Gramsci.  Gramsci took Marxist critical theory (the aim of which was to create a universal revolution whereby the proletariat class would overthrow the bourgeoisie) and broaden it to (1) deconstruct all social institutions (not just government and the economy), (2) create a crisis that would galvinise people and force them into action, and (3) leave open the end that this critique will produce.[5]  The Azanian version of critical theory is not open-ended, but it is someone’s or some group’s vision of what an African social construct might be.  In other words, it is putty in the hands of someone wanting to destroy how it has been previously shaped and made into whatever one wishes.

A significant element of Azanian philosophy is to deconstruct not only the power of white people in South Africa but also white methods and white logic as they appear in the academy.  The flip side of this deconstruction of whiteness is not by any means a more pristine pursuit of universalism or colourblindness but a promotion of blackness.  Referencing the claims of M. B. Ramose, Joel Modiri says, ‘The massive academic and scientific power that whites wield over higher education and knowledge production is characterised by a Eurocentric order of knowledge and a Northbound gaze.’[6]  This claim imagines a hegemonic intellectualism and politic in higher education.  That higher education can become so has been demonstrated repeatedly, such as in the ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI) values in Western universities in the 21^st century.  The question to ask, however, is whether the university is capable of self-correcting by virtue of being committed to a notion of truth that allows disagreement and requires proof, not political posturing.  The Azanian philosophy offers the opposite.  Like DEI, it is a political ideology that does not support the values of true research.  Like DEI, it is racist.  Unlike DEI, its values are African (not diversity), privilege (not equity), and exclusion (not inclusion).

Thus, the construction of a black African intellectual tradition would be

a self-consciously cultivated and reproduced tradition of analysis deriving its key questions, assumptions, methods, conceptual conventions, styles, and idioms from the authority of Black historical experiences and from the cosmology and cultural-linguistic resources of the African majority, practiced (institutionally and extra-institutionally) within an autonomous and organised community of interlocutors.[7]

This is not just a replacement of white racism with black racism.  It is that, but it is also a replacement of the very concept of a university that is founded on the Christian and Enlightenment belief in truth.  The university can only function as a uni-versity if the intellectual work of the different fields of study cooperate in working toward the end of truth.  To be a university, a university must reject the notion of different ‘truths’ within different fields of study, let alone for different groups of people or even individuals.  The presumed ‘whiteness’ of the university did not, in fact, call for racist, cultural, or ethnocentric analyses, assumptions, and methods that are promoted by Azanian philosophy.  As M. Mamdani argues, however, the vastly different intellectual views of liberalism, social Marxism, and conservatism are one and the same product of white intellectualism, and therefore to be rejected out of hand.[8]  If universities succumbed to such political lenses bending their vision in academic research and teaching (and it does), as universities their commitment to truth would eventually be corrected.  (This is happening right now to some extent in American universities with the rejection of antisemitism and wokism.)  Azanian philosophy, however, enshrines a particular, ethnic perspective.  It assumes that all research is political, not scientific.  It imagines that one political perspective (African) is preferred.  It further imagines that there is such a thing as an ‘African tradition’ of analysis.  The Azanian construct ignores the diversity of black tribes in South Africa, let alone Africa, itself prior to colonialism and seeks to create something that never was: a supra-cultural culture of African tradition.[9]  Moreover, it ignores the fact that cultures evolve and do not remain static.  Finally, while it rejects certain cultures and enshrines as sacrosanct some constructed and static ‘Azanian’ culture, it lacks a non-political, self-critical analysis and moral critique.

The Azanian philosophy is both pre-colonial in its nostalgia and very much part of Western, Marxist intellectualism.  It is part of the Western intellectual story in that it is a ‘critical theory’.  As such, it interprets everything through the lens of power (versus truth).  It rejects the very notion of objectivism (and therefore scientific research).  In its promotion of a particular type of subjectivism, one that is African, it hopes to return to a pre-colonial past, and in so doing it takes postmodernity to its natural and next stage: tribalism.[10]  Its replacement for Marxist utopianism is this imaginary ‘Azania’, a pan-African ‘something’ that is good simply because it is African and that has little to define it other than the vaguest of vague notions.  The question will need to be asked, ‘Is it also violent?’  As G. Gerhart says of what Modiri calls the Azanian tradition, ‘the only way in which domination will ever be broken is by a black force.’[11] (The rejection of liberalism’s assimiliationist hopes and the terrible consequences of what we are now to call an Azanian programme was imagined in the fictional book by South Africa’s celebrated author, Nadine Gordimer, in July’s People.)

Three intellectual projects that Modiri rejects are liberalism (modernist and postmodernist), privileging ‘deracialisation’ over ‘decolonisation’, and the postcolonial shift to nation building that ignored the ongoing white supremacy and imperialism.  I will present my own descriptions of these but try to get at the points he is making.  Liberalism operates in the modernist world of universal reason and therefore rejects the independence of a racial group.  It seeks to address racism by skirting the issue of race and addressing the issues more conceptually.  Postmodern liberal thinking is anti-foundational, and therefore opposes essentialism, the view that some characteristics are essential and not accidental.  Of course, postmodernity is relativistic and subjective, but constructs are considered ephemeral and therefore neither foundational nor essential.  An Azanian philosophy, though, insists that culture and history are essential, and, in the case of Africa, conceptualisation of the self and of the community must necessarily include a cosmology that includes belief in the active role of tribal ancestors, the spirit world, and the solidarity of the community.  Liberalism, on the other hand, seeks to dismantle race when addressing racism in the institutions, social structures, and intellectual understanding.

The second project that Modiri rejects is the privileging of ‘deracialisation’ over ‘decolonisation’.  In this, he notes the work of Suren Pillay, who directs the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town.[12]  The privileged attack of Apartheid in South Africa came from Marxism (in religious circles, ‘liberation theology’).  Marxist thought in South African departments of humanities and Marxist rewriting of the country’s history focussed issues on class, not race.  Thus, capitalism, not colonialism, was the problematic past and the issue to be addressed.

The third project involves addressing ongoing white supremacy and imperialism and not suppressing these matters in the concern of nation building.  (The article is focussed on Western imperialism and ignores Chinese economic colonialism and imperialism in Africa.)  Modiri writes,

Dismantling the conceptual whiteness of the academy will require a new generation of oppositional Black academics to reset the terms of social, historical, political analysis through a sustained intellectual and political engagement with the global archive of liberatory Black thought.[13]

Midway through his essay, Modiri turns to outline three tenets of Azanian social and political thought.  These are:

1.     South Africa as an Unjust and Unethical Political Formation

2.     A Black Radical Conception of Race/Racism

3.     African Culture, History, Experience, and Imagination as the Basis for Knowledge Production and Liberation

To criticise South Africa’s colonial history and the Nationalist Party’s Apartheid programme is an easy if not brief task, and the Azanian theorist picks up the powerful winds of such criticism to sail away on his or her own course.  That course involves

1.     ‘the remaking of African identities against tribalist and ethnic divisions as well as spiritual and cultural repair and transformation of those identities;’[14] 

2.     ‘the total dismantling of white supremacy (and not its accommodation)’;[15]

3.     ‘a fundamental change in the basic structure and governing values of South African society through a re-ordering of its political, economic, and cultural-intellectual systems and practices.’[16]

The Azanian project, then, is one of deconstruction (the second point) and of construction (points 1 and 3). Just who gets to take the helm in ‘remaking’, ‘repairing’, ‘changing’, and ‘re-ordering’, and where all this will lead, is where the messiness of calls for change of any sort steps in.  Moreover, I would argue, to criticise the structure of the state using critical theory (really, Critical Race Theory) as itself ‘white’ and, as the theory goes, therefore bad, is to cover over the history of Africa itself.  This would be like criticising the slave trade from Africa as only a problem of colonialism and not also a problem of African tribal warfare and greedy African chiefs or kings.  The story of power abuse is not the privileged domain of the Europeans or the colonists.  Nor is it the only story by any means.  This is reductivism at its worst.  By interpreting South Africa’s history through the lens of colonialism alone is to miss the human story played out throughout time and cultures: the problem of sin.  Missing from Azanian thought is any serious religious commitment or interpretation.  One can only conclude that the great story of Africa’s turn to Christianity in the 20^th century would be dismissed as just another example of white thought because most of the story of Christian missions in Africa comes from Europe and America.

Modiri follows the argument of the radical Congress Youth League from the 1940s.  This argument is that Africa belongs to Africa, not the whites, who have no rights over the land, the people, or the politics.[17]  The policy of the African Nationalist Congress Youth League (its radical wing) calls for a rejection of the moderate approach of change in South Africa of assimilation of blacks into the white culture and structures of power.  It rejects the desire for

civil and political rights, for belonging, inclusion, and recognition within the settler-created and settler-dominated social order, for access to the civilisational accoutrements and universalist promises of Western modernity, and for the (racial) democratisation of the colonial system.[18]

It also calls for a rejection of the borders established by colonial powers not only for South Africa but for all of Africa (presumably, black Africa).

The constructivist programme of Azanianism may sound concrete, but it is in fact very general and lacks analytical and critical merit. Modiri says,

For the Africanists and black radicals of Azania, the main philosophical and cultural source of the liberation struggle and the primary knowledge system from which paradigms of law, social organisation, political ordering, religious, cultural and educational practices and institutions, ecology, aesthetics, and moral norms for a liberated society would be the unfolding and evolving African historical experience.[19]

Just what is, for example, the religious unfolding and evolving African historical experience?  Is this a return to African Traditional Religion (and, if so, which practices on the continent are African?)?  Does ‘unfolding and evolving’ mean some imaginary new religion made up of religions on the continent, including Christianity and Islam?   Stated in the way it is, the proposal is not only vague but also nonsense.  It imagines itself to be a critical theory, but it is in fact not critical enough.  Whatever roams on the African continent—provided it is not an import unsuited to Africa—is gathered uncritically as treasure.  The process of ‘unfolding and evolving’ is mere ethnographic appreciation, not discernment.  The Azanian project begs the questions, ‘Who gets to say what is good and why?’

In this essay, I have noted my own aversion to Azanian philosophy.  One of my criticisms is that, like so much of the social Marxism in which Azanianism is rooted but also from which it departs, the details of where this is all headed are vague, and the project could take various turns.  My own suggestion is rootedness not in some human identity, such as African, but in the Christian tradition that is both particular or exclusive and universal.  The Azanian project, I suggest, is an anti-university project in its rejection of the pursuit of truth and the unity fields of study have because there is such a thing as truth.  It is representative of the sort of postmodern subjectivism in great favour in the universities under Western dominance while also of the African tribalism that affirms a particular subjectivism: a reinvented and reformed African tradition.  South Africa has been floating listlessly since Apartheid—the winds of liberation having dropped.  It is a ship going nowhere in the doldrums of a wide ocean.  Azanianism proposes to dismantle the ship, a white man’s vessel, while still at sea.  If this project takes hold in South African university departments, the university will be replaced with the ‘ulwaluko’ or circumcision and instruction in manhood institution of traditional Africa.  The erudite academics, with their critical theory and imaginative constructions of African identity of the present university, will be redundant.

Related Articles by Rollin Grams: 

Mission as Theological Education in Africa 6: Academic Challenges in African Universities

This is an article summarising a book addressing problems in African universities, particularly in South Africa: R. W. Johnson, African University: The Critical Case of South Africa and the Tragedy of the UKZN (Tafelberg Short, 2012).

The Postmodern University and Its New Methodologies

This article gives a brief summary of new methodologies.

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[1] Joel Modiri, ‘Azanian Political Thought and the Undoing of South African Knowledges,’ Theoria, Issue 168, Vol. 68, No. 3 (September 2021), pp. 42-85; online: Modiri_Azanian_2021.pdf (accessed 30 March, 2025). 

[2] Modiri himself avoids the term ‘Azanianism’, but he uses different nouns to follow ‘Azanian’.

[3] Modiri, p. 44.  I have attempted to abbreviate the points in the interest of greater simplicity.

[4] Modiri, p. 45.

[5] For Antonio Gramsci, see the collection of his writings in The Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916-1935, ed. David Forgacs (New York: New York University, 2000).  For my discussion of Gramsci, see my What is Progressive Theology? (self-published, pdf, 2022), pp. 100-104; available at my bookshop, Bible and Mission: Book Shop.

[6] Modiri, p. 47; M. B. Ramose, ‘“African Renaissance”: A Northbound Gaze’, Politeia 19.3 (2000), pp. 47–61.

[7] Modiri, p. 48.

[8] As noted by Modiri, p. 49.  Cf. M. Mamdani, ‘When Does a Settler Become a Native? Reflections on the Colonial Roots of Equatorial and South Africa,’ Inaugural lecture as AC Jordan professor of African Studies (Cape Town: University of Cape Town, 1998).

[9] There are similar projects that could be reviewed: a racially and ethnically determined, pan-Slavic movement in the 19^th and early 20^th century, a Germanic racial movement in fascist Germany and surrounding countries in the mid-20^th century; a pan-Islamic, religio-political ideology (cf. Abul A’la Maududi); etc.

[10] I addressed this development in 2017.  Cf. Rollin G. Grams, The Church and Western Tribalism: Studies in Theology and Culture (self-published, pdf., 2017); available from my bookshop online: Bible and Mission: Book Shop.

[11] G. Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa: Evolution of an Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 163.

[12] Articles written by Suren Pillay and cited by Modiri are: ‘Translating ‘South Africa’: Race, Colonialism and Challenges of Critical Thought after Apartheid,’ in H. Jacklin and P. Vale, eds, Re-imaging the Social in South Africa: Critique, Th`eory and Post-apartheid Society (Durban: KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2009), pp. 235–267, and ‘Why I am No Longer a Non-racialist: Identity and Difference,’ in X. Mangcu, ed, The Colour of our Future: Does Race Matter in Post apartheid South Africa (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2015), pp. 133 – 152.

[13] Modiri, p. 55.  In this third point, Modiri references the work of Jemima Pierre, an associate professor of sociocultural anthropology at the University of California, LA.  See her The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2013).

[14] Modiri, p. 61, referencing Gerhart, p. 61.

[15] Modiri, p. 61, referencing R. M. Sobukwe, ‘The Opening Address at the Africanist Inaugural Convention,’ (4 April 1959); https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/document-58-robert-mangaliso-sobukwe-opening-address-africanist-inaugural-convention-4 (accessed 31 March, 2025).  However, Sobukwe cannot so easily be signed up to Azanianism as Modiri wishes.  He did reject European intellectual and political exports to Africa, but he did not call for a racial division.  Instead, he said, ‘We guarantee no minority rights, because we think in terms of the individual, not groups.’  (Azanianism rejects the ‘European’ group in favour of the ‘African’ group.)  Sobukwe, therefore, rejected multiculturalism, what he termed ‘multi-racialism’: ‘To us the term "multi-racialism" implies that there are such basic insuper­able differences between the various national groups here that the best course is to keep them permanently distinctive in a kind of democratic apartheid. That to us is racialism multiplied, which probably is what the term truly connotes.’  Perhaps Sobukwe would say that Modiri’s Azanian project is racialism multiplied by virtue of a tyrannical apartheid.  Like Apartheid, Azanianism sees the world in terms of racial groups, not individuals.  Like Apartheid, it privileges one group and its culture over another.  There is a real problem in trying to tie a postmodern, tribalist (or racist) critical theory in the 21^st century to a modernist, anti-Apartheid critique in the mid-20^th century.  Indeed, Modiri wants to assert that racism is itself a European concept that needs to be deconstructed.  He says, ‘Race, for the Africanists, has no real meaning outside of the historical and political context of its ideational fabrication and material (re)production’ (p. 66).  Yet, his criticism of the white Europeans who introduced race as the primary category for determining human value, political power, and economic advantage is not limited to what they did but to who they were as white Europeans.  The end of the matter is that Azanianism makes race the key factor in everything.  It is inherently racist.  Indeed, Modiri later says, quoting Gerhart (p. 158) once again, the problem with the critique of Apartheid or colonialism in Africa by liberals and Marxists, was their  ‘failure to foreground the materiality of race, white supremacy, and settler-colonialism’ (p. 71).

[16] Modiri, p. 61, referencing G. Gerhart, p. 68.

[17] Modiri, p. 60, referencing G. Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa: Evolution of an Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 67.

[18] Modiri, p. 61, referencing J. Soske, Internal Frontiers: African Nationalism and the Indian Diaspora in Twentieth-Century South Africa (Johannesburg: Wits University Press. 2018).

[19] Modiri, pp. 69-70.