The philosopher Descartes said the only thing he was certain about was his doubts. But how could he be so sure? The popular student wallposter from the 1990s speaks for a generation which is reluctant to be certain about anything.
Rather than accept that if two people hold opposing opinions, at least one of them must be wrong, we would rather deny the laws of logic and live with contradictions. Nobody is to be damned, everybody is to be affirmed and accepted, everybody is right.
The scepticism of Doubting Thomas is being displaced quite frighteningly in the area of public truth, morals and ethics by the gullibility of Simple Simon.
So the correspondence St Paul had with the churches in Galatia in tomorrow's epistle reading comes with the effect of a bucket of icy water on the appealing warmth within which many of us would like to be cocooned. In a nutshell, false teachers were running a "Back-to-Moses" campaign in the churches. They were legalists - no access to God's grace without circumcision - and they were racists, wanting to put Gentile believers in an apartheid zone of diminished privileges within the fast-growing Christian Church.
Paul defends the message he has preached with vehemence (1:8-9) and in one of his most purple passages sets forth the gospel of grace: "Through the law I died to the law so that I might live for God. I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, then Christ died for nothing" (2:19-21).
Grace, for Paul, is not the opposite of clumsiness, but the opposite of merit. Grace is favour extended to undeserving people as a gift. Grace exposed Saul of Tarsus as a legalistic racist, energetically manufacturing his own salvation. Slavish adherence to the Jewish law led not to perfection but to a depressing sense of failure and condemnation.
Then Paul suddenly found himself free! Free from legalistic religion, free from fear of God's final judgment, delivered from racial pride.
He could mix with Christians of any race because they, too, had come into God's kingdom by free grace alone via trust in Jesus's death on Calvary and the sufficiency of their Saviour's merit alone.
Then all hell broke loose over grace and Paul found himself in a headbanging set-to with St Peter in Antioch, when even his own colleague Barnabas seemed ready to defect (2:11-13). Paul would not be moved. Peter was wrong on two counts. His behaviour was inconsistent because he had given in to the conservative Jews who wanted Gentile believers to be circumcised, and his theology was inconsistent because he was putting the centrality of grace in jeopardy.
If Peter, also an apostle, got it wrong and let the side down where truth was concerned, how much easier is it for us to avoid taking a public stand for truth when necessary? Paul teaches us that a Christian man or woman of principle is neither a bigot nor a troublemaker but a hero.
It's all there in the Letter to the Galatians. Religion says "Obey the rules! Be like this!" The gospel says salvation is a gift of God's grace, holiness is the fruit of his Spirit working transformingly within us and we discover both when we are set free by Jesus. It's glorious good news, and like Paul we should never be embarrassed to confess it nor compromise it on the issue of God's free grace in Jesus Christ that is at its heart.
Despite the trend of the times, this is truth that cannot be negotiated because, as the apostle so compellingly argues, it is for freedom that Christ has set us free and we must never again submit to enslavement (5:1).
G.F.