Contemporaneous

Paul’s theme is ‘the activity of God then and now’; his one question is: ‘What was God doing in Jerusalem that is revealing as to what God is doing now in Galatia?’ Again, the contemporaneity of God’s action is not a mere application of an event that belongs essentially to the past. God is unceasingly active through the apocalypse of the gospel announcement: ‘for Paul, the history of the gospel is what it is because the God who acted in it is the God who is now acting in it’. The saving event happens in the word of the gospel. The proclamation of Christ’s ‘there and then’ is itself the mode of Christ’s redemptive presence ‘here and now’. Ben Myers

The Protestantism I was brought up in certainly relegated the Gospel action of God to the distant past. Our present action of faith was in respect to what occurred, not what is occurring. There was never a question of what God is doing now because of what he did then. Or even a special understanding that it was the same God and the same plan of redemption. The inherent goal of every preached message was always how we can appropriate what happened then for ourselves now. Moving out of that theological ghetto has, and continues to be, incredibly liberating for my faith.