Paul's letter to the Galatians begins with a proclamation of deliverance from this present evil age and comes to a climax with the ringing cry "new creation!" The Galatians live between these two poles and the letter moves their new identity in Christ to the implications of that identity for their life together.
Susan Eastman here presents the argument that Galatians 4:12-5:1 play a key role in this movement - it displays the power of God's act in Christ, apart from the law, not only to generate but to perfect the Galatians' new life in Christ. She shows that Paul communicates to his converts the motivation and power necessary to move them from their ambivalence about his gospel to a faith that "stands fast" in its allegiance to Christ alone. She further states that the medium and the message are inseparable. Paul's discourse or "mother tongue" - packed with maternal images, representative, vulnerable and yet authoritative and above all, marked by personal suffering - demonstrates the content of the good news.
Building on and developing more deeply previous work on Paul's language,
Recovering Paul's Mother Tongue is a literary and theological exploration of this biblical text's power to transform and sustain.
