From Our Archives

For earlier essays on this week's RCL texts, see Dan Clendenin, My Favorite Verse That's Not in the Bible (2022); Walking the Way of Saint Francis (2016); and Debie Thomas, Truth in Advertising (2019).

This Week’s Essay

A guest essay by Barbara Pitkin (Ph.D. University of Chicago), Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at Stanford University, and member of Grace Lutheran Church in Palo Alto, California. Barbara researches and writes about the history of Christian thought and biblical interpretation. Her most recent book is Calvin, the Bible, and History: Exegesis and Historical Reflection in the Era of Reform (Oxford University Press, 2020).

NOTE: Next week, JWJ staff writer Amy Frykholm begins writing our lectionary essays every week.

Gal. 5:1: “For freedom Christ has set us free.”

Gal. 5:13: “For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become enslaved to one another.”

Many Christians in the United States will be pondering Paul’s gospel of freedom in the time between Juneteenth and the Fourth of July. The events commemorated by these U.S. holidays resound with themes of freedom and independence. But they also bear echoes of oppression, enslavement, insurrection, and violence. Even those not following the lectionary or currently commemorating freedoms won can relate to Paul’s exhortation to the Galatians to reflect on the nature of Christian freedom and its social consequences and obligations. 

Paul’s words enjoin Christians everywhere and at all times to temper their freedom by freely binding themselves to acts of love. But what is this freedom for which Christ has set us free? And, to what purpose? What is freedom for? Viewing Paul’s gospel of freedom through the lens of one of Paul’s most powerful interpreters, the theologian and reformer Martin Luther (1483–1546), helps toward a deeper appreciation of the promise and perils of Christian freedom throughout history and in our own times.

In Galatians 4, the apostle Paul advances a complicated, counter-intuitive, and in certain respects problematic interpretation of a story in Genesis to press his claim that those who have received the gospel of Christ are the legitimate offspring of Sarah and Abraham and thus the true heirs of the divine promise (Gal. 4:21–31). Paul’s symbolic interpretation of Sarah and Hagar as two covenants gave later Christian interpreters license to find allegorical meanings in other parts of scripture.

His suggestion that his rival Christian missionaries, whom he judged to be persecuting his flock by insisting on the necessity of circumcision, were Ishmael, while those embracing his gospel were the free children of Sarah, also reveals tensions at the heart of the early Christian movements. With vivid imagery, heated language, and outright sarcasm, Paul defends his conviction that to submit to the requirements of the Jewish Torah is a form of “enslavement” for believers in Christ. And he warns the Galatians that to compromise their freedom and submit to circumcision would be to forsake Christ and his benefits.

Paul’s opponents in Galatia were not the only ones who struggled with his gospel of freedom, which he states succinctly at the end of his allegory: “For freedom Christ has set us free” (Gal. 5:1). In letters to the Corinthians and the Romans, the apostle likewise had to clear up misconceptions about the meaning and implications of his doctrine. No, the kind of freedom he was proclaiming did not mean that people could act as they pleased; it did not permit them to lord their freedom over or offend others, or to engage in sin so that grace might be increased. 

Title Page of The Twelve Articles (1525).

In Galatians, Paul explains that the freedom of which he speaks is not unbounded, not an opportunity for self-indulgence or sinful behavior. Rather, this freedom is constrained by the responsibility to love one’s neighbor under the guidance of God’s Spirit (Gal. 5:13-25). Having insisted that Gentile believers are not bound to the obligations of the Jewish law, Paul nevertheless quotes from the Torah (Lev. 19:18) to underscore that love is the essence of all the commandments given to the Jewish people. 

Nearly fifteen hundred years later, the theologian and preacher Martin Luther turned to Paul’s gospel of Christian freedom to clarify the role of good deeds in the scheme of salvation. Some New Testament scholars today have debated the accuracy of Luther’s reading of Paul. They caution against reading Paul through the lens of the sixteenth-century concerns that agitated Luther. Primary among these was debate over the role of good works inspired by grace and the Holy Spirit in the process of salvation. It was this concern with religious legalism that shaped Luther’s engagement with Paul and his new application of Paul’s message.

Medieval theories of salvation in the Latin Western tradition included good works to some extent, since justification was understood as a long process of healing from sin. Inspired by grace, Christians carried out good deeds that contributed in some way to their salvation by helping them become more virtuous and holy. While Paul proclaimed that Gentile Christians were free from the obligations of Jewish law (the law of love excepted!), Luther’s concern was with ethical activity in general and the underlying motives for doing good. 

In his treatise “The Freedom of a Christian” (1520), Luther zeroed in on the paradox at the heart of Paul’s notion that Christians have been set free in Christ to become “enslaved” to others through love. A helpful distinction is between what Christians have been freed from and what they are now free for. According to Luther, Christ sets people free from demands to do good works in order to earn God’s forgiveness, from condemnation and divine wrath for failure to do so. The gospel promises forgiveness of sins to all who receive it — who believe that what God promises is true: that he will forgive sins because of Christ’s righteousness. For Luther, this is all that is required for salvation: “True faith in Christ is an incomparable treasure that brings a person complete salvation and deliverance from all evil.” The Word of promise indwelling in the believing soul is what makes people acceptable to God, as a free gift.

But if good works are no longer a condition for salvation, then what is the point of doing them? What is freedom for? Luther is quick to add, “Our faith in Christ does not free us from works but from false opinions concerning works, that is, the foolish presumption that justification is acquired by works.” On the one hand, Christians should still strive toward holiness, freed now from concern that their ethical failings will jeopardize their salvation. On the other, even though they do not need good works for their own salvation, Luther writes, “we should be guided in all our works by this one thought alone — that we may serve and benefit others in everything that is done, having nothing else before our eyes except the need and advantage of the neighbor.” God doesn’t need your good works. Other people do.

Luther here aligns with Paul’s insistence that the Galatians were called to freedom so that through love they would become “enslaved” to one another (Gal. 5:13). Luther’s emphasis is that the fulfillment of this duty is a consequence of salvation, not a condition for it. With this insight, Luther’s famous treatise builds on his reading of Paul on freedom to make an abiding contribution to Christian ethics. Christians are free to love without any thought of reward for themselves or, indeed, without distinguishing between those who deserve and don’t deserve their love. This does not make their love purer or their service more perfect. But, for Luther, it means that their charitable actions are not motivated by self-interest but rather by the neighbor’s need. 

This is an ideal well worth pondering and acting upon. But it is also important to note that Luther’s understanding of Christian freedom, like Paul’s, lent itself to other interpretations. And, moreover, that Luther retreated from the more radical implications of his notion of freedom when faced with the unintended consequences of his ideas. Just a few years after Luther wrote, a violent conflict driven by divergent expectations regarding the impact of freedom on the social order resulted, as historian Lyndal Roper traces in her book, Summer of Fire and Blood (Basic Books, 2025), in “the end of the Lutheran movement as a gospel of liberation” (361).

Conflicting visions concerning the scope of Christian freedom and what exactly freedom was for erupted in a mass uprising known as the German Peasants’ War. This large-scale revolt against an oppressive feudalistic social order built on earlier protests and longstanding discontent. Between 1524 and 1526, it engulfed territories in modern-day south and central Germany and parts of Switzerland, Austria, France, and Italy. The revolutionaries included actual peasants, lower-class workers, and other commoners, all demanding better treatment from their noble and ecclesiastical overlords. More than in previous insurrections, however, the rebels in the mid-1520s were inspired by the religious rhetoric of Luther and other reformers about the freedom and equality of all Christians.

Title Page of Freedom of a Christian (1520).

In one of their mass-produced rallying documents, “The Twelve Articles” (1525), a confederation of Swabian peasants prefaced their demands for rights to hunt, fish, and to be subject to reasonable labor expectations and rental charges with a claim to the right to choose their own pastors. They justified these requests by appealing to their Christian freedom: “For Christ redeemed and bought us all with his precious blood, the lowliest shepherd as well as the greatest lord, with no exceptions. Thus the Bible proves that we are free and want to be free” (Article 3, trans. Roper). The authors clarify that they do not wish to be absolutely free or subject to no authority. And they insist at the start that the gospel is “not the cause of revolt and disorder, since it is the message of Christ, the promised messiah, the Word of Life, teaching only love, peace, patience, and concord. Thus all who believe in Christ should learn to be loving, peaceful, long-suffering, and harmonious” (Preface).

From our perspective, these demands seem reasonable. However, they threatened the existing social order and circulated in a climate of rebellion, violence, and armed conflict. The first revolts had begun in the fall of 1524, and they reached a high point in the late spring of 1525. Loosely organized peasant bands attacked and plundered monasteries, convents, castles, and other estates. They confiscated and destroyed property and, for the most part, “humiliated but did not kill their lords” (Roper, 5). 

In response, the princes and other nobility began mobilizing. Luther at first recognized the peasants’ cause for grievance and cautioned against violence. He insisted that his view of Christian freedom meant an inner, spiritual freedom before God and implied that redress of social grievances was not required by the gospel. But when the rebellion expanded, he urged the nobles to crush the “robbing and murdering hordes” with every means available. Which they did, massacring the revolutionaries in decisive battles and executing their leaders upon surrender. In the end, as many as 100,000 peasants were killed.

Roper observes, “It was all very well for Luther’s supporters to argue later that he had meant spiritual freedom” but that for the peasants, particularly those who were serfs, “freedom meant ending serfdom too” (2). In a world that is still marked by inequality, injustice, and polarization, the story of the peasants’ struggle for freedom invites Christians today to critical and humble reflection. What is Christian freedom for — for us? Is it merely a spiritual freedom, pertaining only to individual salvation and preserving the social status quo? Or freedom also for the greater, collective good? 

Paul’s call to love through freedom resonates as a challenge to see ourselves bound to our neighbors. Mindful of the failings of Luther’s actions toward the peasants, may we be guided by his vision of a freedom to love in humility and grace, motivated by gratitude and our neighbor’s need: liberated for love and service of others not for our benefit, but for theirs, and for the flourishing of all humanity and creation.

Weekly Prayer

By Martin Luther (1483-1546)

Free before God, bound to our neighbor

From faith there flows a love and joy in the Lord. From love proceeds a joyful, willing, and free mind that serves the neighbor willingly and takes no account of gratitude or ingratitude, of praise or blame, of gain or loss. We do not serve others with an eye toward making them obligated to us. Nor do we distinguish between friends and enemies or anticipate their thankfulness or ingratitude. Rather, we freely and willingly spend ourselves and all that we have, whether we squander it on the ungrateful or give it to the deserving. 

From The Freedom of a Christian (1520), trans. Mark Tranvik.

Dan Clendenin:dan@journeywithjesus.net 

Image credits: (1) Wikipedia.org and (2) Heidelberger historische Bestände – digital.