And anyone wanting to offer a serious Christian account of central topics on contemporary applied theology - liberation, for instance, or postmodernity - ought, if such theology is to be fully Christian, to ground their reflections in the NT. Particularly, anyone offering a theological account of, say, justification would feel bound at least to make a visit to Galatians and to fit it somehow into the developing scheme. Equally, no systematic or practical theology that would claim to be Christian can ignore the central and foundational texts of the NT. It is not that one should allow Paul’s meaning in one place to determine ahead of time what he might have said elsewhere, but that even if development, or a change of mind, has occurred, we are still dealing with the same person talking about more or less the same things. One must, in particular, be familiar with how Paul uses similar ideas in other letters, in this case especially Romans. One must, that is to say, know something of the grammar of theological concepts, how God-language works (particularly, how it worked in the first century), how justification might relate to law and faith, and so on.

It is of course generally recognized that anyone grappling with the exegesis of Galatians must do business with “theological” questions. Our aim is to discuss, particularly, what might happen when we allow questions of exegesis and theology to stare each other in the face. Our aim here is not to solve the problems in question but to discuss and illustrate the task. Nor can this chapter do more than restate the questions and hint at possible answers. But what it was that mattered, and why, and why it should matter to anyone two thousand years later - these are far harder questions to answer. Nobody reading it can be in any doubt that it all mattered very much indeed to Paul. Sometimes perceived as a flamboyant younger sister of the more settled and reflective letter to Rome, this epistle has provoked endless controversy at all levels, from details of exegesis to flights of systematic theology. The dense and dramatic argument of Galatians excites and baffles by turns. Green and Max Turner, eds., 2000, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 205–36. (Originally published in Between Two Horizons: Spanning New Testament Studies and Systematic Theology Joel B.

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