There’s no subject that got the Apostle Paul’s dander up quite like Christian liberty.
The Epistle to the Galatians, which is largely dedicated to the topic, is full of exclamations like, “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and turning to a different gospel” (1:6) and “O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you?” This “bewitching” was the result of what Protestants have called “binding the conscience,” which threatened to subject the Galatian believers to a yoke of slavery.
CHRISTIAN LIBERTY DISTINCT FROM LIBERTY
For modern Americans, there are few subjects that get our dander up quite like what we call “liberty.” And for Christians, there’s a grave danger of confusing the two—Christian liberty and political liberty. But there’s in fact a very great distance between the two, a distance that the controversies over coronavirus have led many of us to lose sight of.
For some of us, we feel as through our liberty is being infringed upon anytime anyone tells us what to do. But for Paul, however, it was not actions that were the primary object of liberty, but consciences.
Consider the matter at stake in Galatians:
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