So Quickly Drifting To A Different Gospel

Paul told the Galatians, "I am amazed that you are so quickly deserting Him who called you by the grace of Christ, for a different gospel" (Galatians 1:6). He expressed a similar sentiment to the Corinthians (2 Corinthians 11:4).

If churches as early as these Pauline ones were in such danger and sometimes erred while under Paul's supervision, there's even more potential in some ways for later individuals and churches to err in that manner. My post earlier this week provides many examples of how that sort of thing happened a lot in later church history, regardless of which side of those later disputes you take. The disputes happened, and both sides (or more than two in some contexts) couldn't be right, given the nature of their claims.

I'm not suggesting that every or almost every post-apostolic source before the Reformation wasn't a Christian or anything like that. As I've argued in many previous posts and elsewhere, there was far more belief in justification through faith alone among the pre-Reformation sources than people often suggest. And I allow for the salvation of people who hold false soteriological views. People are often inconsistent, as we see with Peter and the Galatians, for example. In some ways, later individuals and groups who have contradicted Paul's soteriology have been better than the Judaizers. They've accepted the authority of the apostles, have often read documents like Paul's letters in their church services, etc. So, when Cyprian sees two sacraments (baptism and the laying on of hands) as a means of justification in John 3:5 or a medieval Roman Catholic believes that you have to obey the Pope in order to be saved, for example, I allow for the possibility or probability of their salvation. I make a judgment based on the totality of the evidence, including their access to the gospel and their affirmations of it in some places, even if they were inconsistent with it at times.

My main point here, though, is that departing from the gospel isn't as difficult as some people make it out to be. It was a prominent concern in Paul's day, and it sometimes happened even with people under the apostles' supervision. People often underestimate the soteriological inconsistencies we see in post-apostolic church history. Supposedly, none or few of the soteriological contradictions we see among the church fathers, medieval theologians, and other sources rise to the level of a false gospel. But it makes more sense to acknowledge that the soteriological errors are more significant than that and allow for the salvation of the individuals involved, despite their false soteriology.

The Importance Of Galatians 3:2

It's a highly significant passage in the context of justification. It's often neglected, though. I recommend committing the passage reference (Galatians 3:2) and at least a portion of its text to memory.

The verse begins with a reference to "the only thing" Paul wants to know, which reflects the verse's significance in the context of Galatians and, therefore, in the context of justification. And he goes on to refer to "hearing with faith", an important phrase that expresses two vital components of the gospel: the context in which justification occurs (hearing) and the means by which it's received (faith, not faith combined with baptism or faith combined with anything else). For a further discussion of the verse and its surrounding context (including the false claim that verse 27 supports baptismal regeneration), see here.

Is baptismal regeneration a significant problem only if baptism is a work?

Baptism is a work, for reasons I've discussed elsewhere, like here. But even if it weren't a work, there would still be many reasons to consider baptismal regeneration problematic and in more than a minor way. See here for an overview of a double-digit number of problems with viewing baptism as a means of justification. Here and here are a couple of posts in which I discuss some of the bad fruit of baptismal regeneration, bad fruit that I think is significant and doesn't require viewing baptism as a work.

People often frame things in terms of whether including baptism with faith as a means of justification constitutes a false gospel. (It does, but that's not what I'm addressing here.) They'll often cite Galatians 1:8-9 in particular. But this isn't an all-or-nothing situation. Baptismal regeneration wouldn't have to be maximally bad in order to be bad or to be bad to more than a small extent. We recognize that in other contexts. If a church leader has some moral problems in his life, we don't dismiss those problems as insignificant just because they aren't maximally bad. It's remarkable how many people will acknowledge that baptismal regeneration is false, yet will act as though it should be of little concern if it doesn't rise to the level of Galatians 1. There's a large gray area between something being of little concern and something rising to the level of the anathema of Galatians.

How unusual is Galatians' approach toward the gospel?

Critics of how Evangelicals use Galatians could raise objections to the effect that Galatians is just one document, it's such a short letter, the approach Paul takes there isn't found much or at all elsewhere, etc. On the more liberal side, Galatians could be dismissed as an occasion when Paul lost his temper, a reflection of a bad aspect of Paul's character that we shouldn't emulate, or whatever. From a more conservative or traditional Christian perspective, it could be argued that we should be agnostic about or not base much on certain aspects of Galatians, since it's such a short letter, we don't know much about the context, the themes in question there aren't found much or at all elsewhere, etc.

But even if something Paul said in Galatians were only found there, it ought to be accepted as part of apostolic teaching, what's taught by scripture, and so on. That point could be conceded, yet the alleged rarity of what Galatians says could be appealed to in order to argue that the themes shouldn't be as prominent in our thinking as they are among many Evangelicals. Though I think Galatians expresses views like the foundational nature of sola fide more forcefully than any other source, that sort of material in Galatians is corroborated elsewhere more than people typically suggest.

Is the gospel larger than sola fide?

Many Evangelicals have cited Galatians and other parts of scripture against Roman Catholicism and other groups they think hold a false gospel. A common response has been to cite passages in the Bible that refer to the gospel without defining it the way those Evangelicals are defining it (Mark 1:1, 1 Corinthians 15:1-8, etc.).