Galatians 3:28

Another difference is that under faith all believers share the same privilege and position. Paul was not saying that all distinctions between people have ceased. Obviously people are still either Jews or Gentiles, slaves or free, and male or female. His point was that within the body of Christ all have the same relationship to God. All are of equal value. Paul may have used a fragment of an early Christian hymn here (cf. 1 Corinthians 12:12-13; Colossians 3:9-11).

"The three pairs of opposites Paul listed stand for the fundamental cleavages of human existence: ethnicity, economic capacity, and sexuality. Race, money, and sex are primal powers in human life." [Note: George, p. 284. See his excursus "Was Paul a Feminist?" pp. 286-93, which also relates this passage to liberation theology.]

Most of the evangelical feminists regard this verse as the major passage that teaches the abolition of male leadership in Christianity. Paul Jewett, for example, believed that Paul’s teaching that woman is subordinate to man, for whose sake God created her, came from rabbinism rather than revelation. [Note: P. Jewett, Man as Male and Female, p. 112.] Daniel Fuller reflected the same conclusion but for a slightly different reason.

". . . he [Paul] supported, by way of accommodation, a Christianized slavery and patriarchalism, but with regard to both he left sufficient clues for the church to have understood that these teachings no longer applied after the ’neither Jew nor Greek’ issue had been settled." [Note: D. Fuller, "Paul and Galatians 3:28," Theological Students Fellowship Bulletin 9:2 (November-December 1985):12-13.]

Bruce took what I consider to be a more biblically defensible position on this verse.

"The first stipulation here . . . is that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek . . .; the breaking down of the middle wall of partition between these two was fundamental to Paul’s gospel (Ephesians 2:14 f.). By similarly excluding the religious distinction between slaves and the freeborn, and between male and female, Paul makes a threefold affirmation which corresponds to a number of Jewish formulas in which the threefold distinction is maintained, as in the morning prayer in which the male Jew thanks God that he is not a Gentile, a slave or a woman. . . .

"The reason for the threefold thanksgiving was not any disparagement of Gentiles, slaves or women as persons but the fact that they were disqualified from several religious privileges which were open to free Jewish males." [Note: Bruce, p. 187.]

Gentiles, slaves, and women did not enjoy the same access to God in Israel’s formal worship as did Jews, free men, and males. They could trust God for their personal salvation, however. The priests in Israel had to be Jews, free, and males. Now in the church every Christian is a priest (1 Peter 2:9-10). Paul’s emphasis, however, was on believers’ unity in Christ, not their equality with one another.

"Galatians 3:28 says nothing explicitly whatsoever about how male/female relationships should be conducted in daily life. Even the feminists acknowledge that the context of Galatians 3 is theological, not practical. [Note: Footnote 21: Letha Scanzoni and Nancy Hardesty, All We’re Meant to Be, pp. 18-19.] Paul is here making a theological statement about the fundamental equality of both men and women in their standing before God. Thus any ideas about how this truth should work itself out in social relationships cannot be drawn from Galatians 3:28, but must be brought to it from one’s broader understanding of the nature of things." [Note: A. Duane Litfin, "Evangelical Feminism: Why Traditionalists Reject It," Bibliotheca Sacra 136:543 (July-September 1979):264. For a good evaluation of the feminists’ arguments, see ibid.; and Roger Oldham, "Positional and Functional Equality: An Appraisal of the Major Arguments for the Ordination of Women," Mid-America Theological Journal (Fall 1985):1-29; Kenneth Gangel, "Biblical Feminism and Church Leadership," Bibliotheca Sacra 140:557 (January-March 1983):55-63; and H. Wayne House, "’Neither . . . Male nor Female . . . in Christ Jesus’," Bibliotheca Sacra 145:577 (January-March 1988):47-56.]

The statement does not mean "that all male-female distinctions have been obliterated in Christ, any more than that there is no racial difference between the Christian Jew and the Christian Gentile." [Note: Fung, p. 175.]