Holy Words, Human Words

“See with what large letters I am writing to you with my own hand,”
(Galatians 6:11)

For the last two thousand years and for the rest of human history, people will read these words of St. Paul. Here we have, forever canonized in the Holy Scriptures themselves, the mysterious fact that the Bible was written by real people, to real people. No one who claims to believe in the authority of Holy Scripture can deny that St. Paul wrote those words “with his own hand.”

“That’s all fine,” someone will say, “but you cannot serve two masters. So let us forget this business about human authorship and go straight to God. The bible is God’s word, period.” And then these self-proclaimed defenders of God and the Bible will invent a non-biblical theory about how God wrote the Bible, a theory that erases Galatians 6:11. They replace Paul’s large letters with a neat and perfect document, air-dropped from heaven into the King James Bibles, or the New International Version, or whatever they’ve decided is God’s preferred translation.

Imagine for a moment that you were a first-generation Christian in Galatia. Maybe you were even baptized by the Apostle Paul himself. One of the presbyters of the church pulls out a letter, handwritten on papyrus and delivered by the mailman, and he reads it out loud to the congregation. When he’s finished reading, he says, “This is the word of the Lord,” or something along those lines. There is no committee of scholars who approved the letter as authentic, no endorsements on the back from well-known institutions of higher education to assure you of its accuracy. No explanation of the “translation philosophy” to bolster your confidence. You can’t look to the church fathers, or the historic councils, or your favorite Christian author, to tell you that it is indeed God’s Word. It’s just you, your congregation, and this letter from one “Paul of Tarsus.”

We do not possess a different Bible today from the Holy Scriptures of the early Church. We cannot be more certain today that it has the breath of the Holy Spirit than they were. The Book of Proverbs, Psalm 49, the life of Jesus according to St. Matthew, St. Paul’s epistle to the Galatians, all of these texts were written down by the hands of real people, and all of them really are the inspired word of God. It is very incarnational when you think about it. It’s like washing someone with water and saying that they have been reborn in the Holy Spirit, or breaking bread and blessing a cup of wine and saying that we are partaking in the body and blood of Jesus by eating and drinking it.

God breathes into creation to give us a book that is really and mysteriously holy. Sacramental words that are both human and divine, physical and spiritual, law and grace, invitation and command, God’s word and Paul’s word. And we receive that Word the only way it can be received, by faith. For faith alone can understand the incarnation, faith alone can love both God and neighbor.

Now, everyone knows what Jesus means when he says that you cannot serve two masters (Matt. 6:24), especially if they were raised by two parents. In a home, there is either one united head, or else a child must choose between two masters: dad or mom. No doubt we were all guilty in our childhood of asking one parent a question and, if we didn’t get the answer we were looking for, going to the other parent to try and get a different answer. The only way children can be truly cured of this behavior is for the parents to be united in heart and mind. When the parents are united their children cannot be divided in their obedience or in their disobedience. In the same way, we cannot submit to Jesus unless he is united with God the Father. We cannot submit to the Holy Scriptures, to our parents, or to the Church, unless they are united with Jesus.

Listen to what Paul says at the beginning of his letter to the Galatians:

From Paul, an apostle—not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead…I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel…even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. For I would have you know, brothers, that the gospel that was preached by me is not man’s gospel. For I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ
(Galatians 1:1‒12).

According to St. Paul, there is only one gospel. It’s not his gospel, it’s not Peter’s gospel, it’s not John MacArthur’s gospel, or Thomas Cranmer’s gospel. It’s not my gospel and it’s not your gospel. It comes directly from Jesus Christ, and anyone who preaches a gospel different from The Gospel, anyone who changes or distorts it, is accursed. “For I would have you know, brothers, that the gospel that was preached by me is not man’s gospel” (1:11). It is an incarnation gospel that comes to us from Jesus through the Apostles.

Paul does not claim to have found the gospel written down with God’s own hand on golden tables, or that, by divine possession, the Holy Spirit was speaking through him. The gospel which we preached by Paul, “I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ” (Gal. 1:12). Paul positions himself in submission to, and unified with, Jesus Christ. The gospel was given to the Apostles, and it comes to us through preaching. Paul works this out succinctly in Romans 10 where he says, “No one could believe if they had not heard, and they could not have heard unless someone preached, but no one can preach unless they are sent.” That last word in the sentence, sent, comes from the Greek word ἀποστέλλω (apostello), which is why we call them the Apostles. They are literally the “sent ones.” It is Christ who gives us the Gospel, but it is through the apostolic preaching of men that we hear it. We cannot look to man, or to human institutions, for the Way, the Truth, or the Life, and yet it is in human words that we hear the Truth of the gospel; it is through human hands that we are born again in the waters of Holy Baptism; it is with the fruit of human labor, that we are sustained by the spiritual food of the most blessed body and blood of our Lord, Jesus Christ.

Christ and the Church are not two masters. We are the bride of Christ, we are one body and one flesh with him, as Paul says in Ephesians 5. It is with human words that Jesus preaches the good news through those whom he has sent. It is in the Church that we are born a second time, by water and the Holy Spirit. And it is with bread and wine that we participate in the body and blood of Christ. “‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the Church” (Eph.5:31‒32).