GEORGE R. BRUNK III. Galatians. Believers Church Bible Commentary. Harrisonburg, VA: Herald Press, 2015. Pp. 336. $29.99 (U.S.).
Brunk states in his introduction that he wrote his commentary not for New Testament specialists but with “the practical purpose of serving the church and confessional interests” (p. 15). He addresses Anabaptist communities in an effort to show how Galatians speaks to members of the Radical Reformation movement. Brunk observes that Anabaptist tradition has largely neglected Galatians. His commentary is the first since Fritz Kuiper, a Dutch Mennonite preacher, wrote a small volume on Galatians right after World War II (p. 15).
Brunk’s goal is to “bridge the gap from the text in its original context, to the context of the church today—to point a way from exegesis to application” (p. 16). He explains that he does not provide “extensive documentation of scholarship” (p. 16) but chooses to focus on explaining the meaning of Galatians for Anabaptists. Consequently, his introductory comments on authorship, audience, date of writing, and literary structure are quite cursory.
At the end of the commentary, Brunk provides essays on a few significant issues that modern scholars debate concerning Galatians. Regarding whether to translate pistis Christou in 2:16, 20 and 3:22 as “faith in Christ” (objective genitive) or as “the faith of Christ” (subjective genitive), he rejects John Toews’s endorsement of “the faith of Jesus” in the Believers Church Bible Commentary on Romans (p. 305). In this essay, Brunk provides a good deal of helpful information. The other essays are also helpful—to a lesser extent (“Judaism in the Time of Paul”; “Literary and Rhetorical Features of Galatians”; and “Paul’s View of the Law in Galatians”).
In his comments on passages in Galatians, Brunk fulfills his stated intent to explain to Anabaptists the relevance of Paul’s message, seeking to show the importance of this fiery letter for peacemaking Christians. He admonishes his readers to pay attention to both the doctrinal and the practical, ethical dimensions of the faith. He contends that Galatians has importance for helping Christians to consider Paul’s sweeping vision of the new community established in Jesus Christ and how to live in light of it. Readers will discover many thought-provoking insights in Brunk’s sermonic applications at the end of each section of the commentary.
What I find to be disappointing, however, is the truncated nature of Brunk’s scholarship. I was shocked to see that his bibliography is less than three pages long (pp. 323–325). Given the massive number of recent books, articles, and dissertations on Galatians, the thinness of the bibliography puzzles me. To write for a lay audience is a noble goal. But I would expect more thorough scholarship to lay the foundation for his emphasis on practical application. From my bookshelf, I pulled another New Testament commentary from the Believers Church Bible Commentary series and noted that its bibliography is nearly six times longer than Brunk’s. This author draws from a deep well of scholarship without being pedantic, and he thoughtfully applies the biblical texts to contemporary Anabaptist concerns. Brunk’s commentary, on the other hand, lacks adequate interaction with scholarship on Galatians and exhibits little original thinking in the exegetical parts of the book.
Although Brunk recognizes that Paul was upset when he wrote Galatians, he does little justice to the apostle’s sarcastic outbursts. Paul resembled an erupting volcano when he wrote the letter, spewing molten invectives on his audience and the opponents he supposed might be listening in. It would be nice to see some of those emotions coming through in Brunk’s own writing—a sense of edginess that at least partially reflects the tone of this fiery epistle (unless Lauri Thurén is correct in Derhetorizing Paul [Trinity Press International, 2002], where he argues that Paul was not actually angry but used bombastic rhetoric to make his argument sound more persuasive—but I see little evidence that Brunk is aware of such discussions).
I also expected Brunk to be more nuanced in his assessment of Barnabas when commenting on Paul’s accusation in Galatians 2:13 that Barnabas was led astray by other Jewish Christians to join their hypocrisy. Brunk assumes that Paul’s condemnation of his former mentor is a fair description of the confrontation in Antioch. But is it? Were it not for Barnabas, Paul might well have remained in obscurity in Tarsus. Barnabas, entrusted by the apostles to oversee the work at Antioch, took the initiative to seek Paul and bring him back to Antioch to help minister to this mixed-ethnicity church (Acts 11:19-26). Barnabas played a huge role in developing what is now called Pauline theology. He was the senior member of the missionary partnership with Paul. He was not Paul’s vacillating sidekick who was easily shoved around.
Thus I would anticipate that an Anabaptist writer would be favorably disposed toward Barnabas, a man known not only as a powerful leader of the early Christian movement but also as one adept in developing compromise solutions so that ethnic and other factions in the church could live peacefully with each other. I am quite sure that if we could read Barnabas’s version of the Antioch incident, it would differ from Paul’s. The fact that all of the Jewish Christians stood against Paul strongly suggests that much more was at stake than mere hypocrisy. Barnabas had good reasons for making his decision to oppose Paul, with whom he had worked for years and shared so many common concerns, but Brunk does not mention such possibilities. Paul heavily weights his rhetoric in Galatians 2 to elevate his own stature at the expense of other leaders—not an approach that most conflict resolution specialists recommend today.
Members of the Anabaptist community will benefit from reading Brunk’s challenging comments on how the message of Galatians can be applied to contemporary Christian life. He has achieved his goal of writing to serve the confessional interests of Anabaptists. I believe that more thorough scholarship would have enriched this goal.