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 not that there is another one. . . . (1:6-7a)
As I said earlier, Paul skips the proem (thanksgiving or blessing) of his letter, and gets directly to the reason that he is writing.
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: Paul will get to the real substance of the Judaizer controversy in chapter 2. Here, he is denouncing their message as a "different gospel," meaning a
false one.
The gospel Paul preached, which (as he says) he received from Christ, was the message of salvation by faith alone. It is sufficient to have faith in Christ to save you. "Faith" means taking someone at his word; so to put faith in Christ means to trust in the promises of the Bible regarding Christ's ability to atone for sin. There are no other obstacles to salvation: no need to obey an external legal code. In fact, as we'll see in the future, Paul regards justification by faith and justification by works as antithetical: you can't have both.
not that there is another one: There is
one Gospel and one Gospel only, and it is the message that Paul was commissioned to preach: salvation comes by faith alone, through grace alone, by trusting in the work of Christ alone. Adding additional works to this faith nullifies the Gospel, making it no Gospel at all.
This is the error of the Judaizers that Paul was opposing. They were pressuring the Galatians to receive circumcision and obey the Law of Moses, saying it was necessary for salvation (see Acts 15:5). In short, it was
legalism: the imposition of the Law on the Gentiles, for whom it was never intended.
This was, it seems, the first major theological controversy to confront the early Church, and you would think that the matter is settled. Nonetheless, we still have literal Judaizers amongst us today. When I started teaching from Galatians back in 2000, there was a small Sabbatarian church (one that worships on Saturday rather than Sunday) just up the street from my own. (I think the building's still there, but they're not.) Seventh-day Adventists and other Sabbatarian sects claim that while the rest of Christendom observes only nine of the Ten Commandments, they and similar groups observe all ten by keeping the Sabbath on Saturday. Practically speaking, though, their legalism doesn't stop there: many Sabbatarians argue that Christians need to observe the Jewish feast days, dietary regulations, and other parts of the Mosaic law. Sabbath-keeping, like circumcision for the Judaizers of old, is just the bait in their bait-and-switch theology. The influence of Seventh-day churches is dwindling today, but more recently, a movement known as Hebrew Roots has sprung up to advocate a return to Christianity's Jewish origins: the use of Hebrew names for deity, observance of Jewish rather than Christian holidays, or other obedience to the Torah. Basically, whenever you catch someone arguing that Christianity needs to be more Jewish, it's a safe bet he is a Judaizer.
(On a side note, one of the Seventh-day Adventist offshoots that cropped up in the early 20th century was the Worldwide Church of God, the cult founded by Herbert W. Armstrong. They revived British Israelism, the pseudohistorical belief that the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Celts, and other Germanic tribes of northern Europe who settled in the British Isles were the lost ten tribes of Israel. British Israelism was the central tenet of Armstrongism, and the supposed key to understanding Old Testament prophecy. However, not only does Galatians refute Armstrongism's Judaizing theology, but its British Israelism as well. The Galatians were Celts, as I noted earler--and they were Gentiles.)
More broadly speaking, ''legalism'' means adding meritorious obedience to faith. Some Christian traditions (in the broad sense) want to return us to a bondage of works. This is the reason Galatians was a key book for the Reformers: they saw it, not merely as an apologetic against Pharisaism, but the system of the Church of Rome that they strove to reform. It seems to me that the Roman church's confusion of justification and sanctification is what leads to a system in which a faithful Catholic must continually return to the sacraments for justifying grace, and can never know fully in this life that he is saved: "If any one saith, that he will for certain, of an absolute and infallible certainty, have that great gift of perseverance unto the end,-unless he have learned this by special revelation; let him be anathema."[1]
In the 1970s, a movement called "Shepherding" or "Discipleship" emerged in Charismatic circles. This was an extreme form of mentoring, in which "sheep" were required to enter into a covenantal relationship with a "shepherd," who had the authority to micro-manage their personal lives. This included such important, personal decisions as where to live or work or whom to marry. The obedience required of a disciple to a shepherd went well beyond what Scripture requires, and led to abuses. The Shepherding Movement had dispersed by the time I became an adult, but in the mid-1990s, living in Toronto, I was occasionally approached at bus stops or in the mall by members of the International Churches of Christ (ICOC), the so-called "Boston Church." They still practiced this kind of extreme discipleship, leading to their being the subject of more complaints to cult-watchdog groups than any organization other than Scientology. (After leader Kip McKean left in 2001, the ICOC softened its stance on discipling.) The ICOC also follow the Campbellite error of requiring baptism for regeneration.
Other world religions also seek to earn God's favour through doing good works. Islam is one of the fastest-spreading religions in the world. According to Islamic theology, God cannot be known; he can only be obeyed. The most extreme forms of Islamic legalism are found in theocracies headed by factions such as the Taliban or ISIS, but even liberal, Westernized Muslims live in a cycle of prayers, fasting, alms-giving, and pilgrimages to earn Allah's favour. Even so, there is no final guarantee that an arbitrary, capricious Allah will accept them into Paradise.
Legalism takes other forms, as well. It is legalistic to focus on the minute details of the Law, and use them as an excuse to ignore its weightier (but less explicit) matters. This is why Jesus pronounced woe on the Pharisees when he denounced them for "tith[ing] mint and dill and cumin, [but neglecting] the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness" (Matt. 23:23). There is a story in Luke about Jesus healing a crippled woman on the Sabbath (Luke 13:10-17). The ruler of the synagogue is indignant and rebukes the people, telling them to come and get healed on any day other than the Sabbath. Jesus calls out his hypocrisy, noting that he would show more mercy to a hungry animal on the Sabbath by feeding it than he was allowing to be shown to a sick woman. The synagogue ruler couldn't have cared less whether she was healed or not. The rabbinical tradition of the day had a long list of activities that constituted "work," and he was only concerned that no one be seen as doing work in his synagogue on the day of rest--as though the Son of God needed to even lift a finger to heal someone.
Legalism can also mean elevating a pious application of the law to the status of law itself. Here, I think, is where we can find all those rules and traditions in fundydom that we call "standards." Paul wrote that "it is good for a man not to touch a woman" (1 Cor. 7:1 KJV). Of course, he meant in a sexual sense. Yet, on this forum and others, I've read many stories about fundamentalist Bible colleges where a woman had fallen down, and no man would help her up because the rules forbade holding hands. In a misguided effort to honour the
spirit of Paul's instructions, the school forbade the
letter. I think many of these extrabiblical "standards" began their lives as a well-meaning effort to erect a fence around bigger sins. There is also a more malevolent tendency, with the fundamentalist emphasis on separation, to see who can "out-separate" everyone else. Either way, when these well-meaning commandments of men are elevated to the same importance as the commandments of God, you have a legalism problem.
References
[1] Council of Trent, Session 6, January 13, 1547, Canons on Justification, 16,
http://www.documentacatholicaomnia....ilium_Tridentinum,_Canons_And_Decrees,_EN.pdf, accessed April 29, 2020.