Musing 69
Have you ever received a call from an angry parent, or watched a scene in a movie or tv show where the caller just shouts in anger and you can hear the voice across the room?
That’s the modern equivalent of what’s going on here. Paul is livid with the Galatians. He gives only the briefest of hellos before just tearing into the Galatians. The report that Paul now hears about, which has him livid is that in some way, the Galatians have compromised the core of the Gospel. They have turned away from what Paul preached to them.
And so what do we do with this fiery intro?
First, our take away is that the gospel is worth getting angry about. When we see the gospel under attack, it is right to shoot back.
John Calvin rightly said “A dog barks when his master is attacked. I would be a coward if I saw that God’s truth is attacked and yet would remain silent,”.
In our day we tend to be particularly loathe to call out false teaching in the church especially when those false teachers say things we like and recognize as true. Doug Wilson comes to mind as a recent modern example. In many circles, he was either tolerated or actively lauded despite being a schismatic and one of the leading proponents of Federal Vision. But he often makes true critique of the culture. And so it becomes taboo, even among many Reformed folks, to call him out for what he is - a proponent of doctrine uniformly decried as heresy and a rejection of the gospel outside the denomination he helped found.
More generally, because of the threat of atheism and secularism, there is a push within even faithful circles to be as broad as possible within the bounds of orthodoxy so as to present a united front and minimize the real differences between us. Most famous of these efforts is to rehabilitate the Roman Catholic Church as a faithful branch of the church, nevermind the fact that they officially teach we worship the same God as the Muslims. . . despite the fact that the Muslims deny the deity of Christ.
Second - we hold firm on Scriptural lines. As in every age, we are faced with constant pressure to fold on the boundaries that Scripture sets. But it is worth holding to those boundary lines.