---

IN MY LAST POST I began exploring the topic of allegiance as a Christian mindset and practice. Specifically, I am discussing the vital importance for believers to give allegiance to Jesus the Christ, Jesus the Savior-King. We are exploring in this series the significance of allegiance in three Christian dynamics: 1) grace, 2) faith, and 3) baptism.

This is the second post in the series. We examine the dynamic of grace as we consider a few brief excerpts from Prof. John M. G. Barclay’s seminal book Paul and the Gift. We will focus on allegiance to Christ and explore a few implications for believers today. NOTE: This post is lengthy; the topic requires a lot of explanation.

Perhaps you are new to Prof. Barclay or his book. If so, you can get a sense of the quality and impact of his scholarship here, or in this helpful book review, or in this 25-minute podcast/interview with Prof. Barclay.

---

A book that took ten years to research and write, Professor Barclay’s Paul and the Gift is considered one of the most significant books on New Testament theology in recent decades. He introduces what he calls the “six perfections” of grace. This means there are different facets of grace, each of which can be perfected or taken to the “nth degree.” 

Prof. Barclay names these six “perfections” of grace:

1. superabundance—how massive, enduring, and eternal is God’s grace,
2. singularity—the degree to which God is characterized by grace and grace alone,
3. priority—the sense in which God’s grace as first and before, thus marking God’s freedom to give,
4. incongruity—the degree to which God gives grace without regard to the worth of recipients,
5. efficacy—the extent to which grace achieves God’s intentions in those who receive it, and
6. non-circularity—the degree to which grace is reciprocal; it has “strings attached;” God’s people are obliged to return praise, obedience, allegiance to him.

It is this last of the six “perfections”—non-circularity—that will be the main focus of this blog post. That’s because Barclay contends that Paul’s understanding of grace was not non-circular, but rather, obliging.

In other words, Paul viewed God’s grace as circular or reciprocal. God gives the gift of salvation in Christ to all who believe, although none deserve the gift. Therefore, it is “incongruous.” This was counter-cultural to social norms in the ancient world. At the same time, God expects that those who receive the gift of salvation to return honor and praise, loyalty and obedience—allegiance—to him. Therefore, the gift is reciprocal or circular in nature. This reciprocity was not counter-cultural; it is how grace ‘worked’ in the ancient world.

Understanding patronage to understand grace

To answer the question Why is God’s gift of grace reciprocal?, and before we further explore the writings of Prof. Barclay, we need to answer this question: Why are patronage and grace intertwined in the social context of the Roman Empire? The next few paragraphs borrow material from my book The Global Gospel in the chapter titled “Honor/Shame Dynamic #7: Patronage.”

Here’s a description of patronage from New Testament scholar, David deSilva: “Patronage was a [prevalent] social framework in the ancient Mediterranean basin. Patrons were people with power who could provide goods and services not available to their clients. In return, clients provided loyalty and honor to the patrons. Social inequality characterized these patronal relationships, and exploitation was a common feature of such relationships.” [1]

I want to emphasize two points; the first is this: Patronage is a social dynamic between patron and client characterized by reciprocity. Clients return “loyalty and honor to the patrons,” as deSilva noted. History professor J. E. Lendon adds about the Roman Empire and its emperor: “The emperor was the patron, the benefactor, of his every subject. The subjects, in turn, paid him back for his benefactions with their loyalty; this was the basis of his power. Thus, the empire was a single enormous spider’s web of reciprocal favours.” [2]

The diagram below illustrates this reciprocity or circularity.

Our second point is this: People of the Greco-Roman world understood that grace (Gk., charis) is at the very center of the patronage dynamic. In fact, according to deSilva, first-century believers understood that “God’s grace (charis) would not have been of a different kind than the grace with which they were already familiar; it would have been understood as different only in quality and degree.”[3]

There was a distinct honor code about how to give and receive. The benefactor was to be wise, not self-serving. Their gifts were to be given only to honorable people—and thus, examples of excellent stewardship. Reciprocally, the client was to show proper gratitude and honor to the benefactor or patron.

According to the ancient writer Seneca, the reciprocal relationship between patron and client was to be characterized by “three graces”:

Some would have it appear that there is one [grace] for bestowing a benefit, one for receiving it, and the third for returning it; others hold that there are three classes of benefactors—those who receive benefits, those who return them, and those who receive and return them at the same time.

As quoted in deSilva, Honor, Patronage, Kinship, Purity, 106.

Seneca compared these three “graces” of giving, receiving, and returning favor to three sisters who dance “hand in hand … in a ring which returns upon itself.” Speaking of the word grace or charis, deSilva says it “encapsulated the entire ethos of the relationship.”

So the social practice of patronage and benefaction would have related to the love and grace of God. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). Even the giving of God’s Son would have been seen in the light of patronage. A highly honored, magnificent Benefactor is providing a great blessing—the gift of his own Son to many people. Note: this helpful video by New Testament scholar David deSilva makes the point crystal clear—that grace and patronage were integrally related in the Roman Empire.

Is allegiance to “the Christ” integral to grace?

In the Roman Empire, clients of patrons—those who received gifts—were obligated to return honor, loyalty, allegiance—to the patron. Accordingly, Barclay frequently uses the word allegiance in his book (55 times, a few examples below) as well as the word loyalty (26 times) to describe the way believers ought to live their lives in following Christ.

Below I summarize in three points the view of Barclay who contends that Paul understood divine grace as being reciprocal:

1. God the divine Patron gives salvation by grace through Christ without regard to any social capital, moral achievement, or any measure of worth on the part of the recipient (Eph 2:8–9 is an example of this). God’s grace is infinitely greater than what God’s people can ever return to him.
2. At the same time, this grace has strings attached. The Patron’s clients are receivers of God’s gift. And as believers in Christ they have dignifying obligations to reciprocate to their Patron by living an honorable life of good works in praise to God. (I see Eph 2:10 as one example of this).
3. Therefore, one of the qualities of God’s grace is its circularity or reciprocity. This is contrary to the view that some Christians hold—that grace is non-circular. (The view that grace is non-circular holds that once a person is saved by grace, there are zero additional obligations. Allegiance to “the Christ” is optional for believers, not required.)

Below are a few excerpts from Paul and the Gift. Following each excerpt I make brief comments about how this applies or what it means.

---

Excerpts from Barclay’s Paul and the Gift highlighting allegiance to the Christ

The sublime glory of belonging to Christ—this is the heart of Apostle Paul’s entire project. But belonging to Christ also obliges Christians to a purpose—a new humanity marked by counter-cultural love and diversity.

Commenting on Gal 5:13 and the “freedom” of believers to, by love serve other believers, Prof. Barclay writes:

… what counts is allegiance to Christ and adherence to the Spirit. Paul’s paradoxical interpretation of freedom as slavery (“for freedom you have been called … through love be slaves of one another,” 5:13) recalls the opening statement of 1:10–11: Paul is free from human criteria of value (“seeking to please human beings”) because he is a slave of Christ (1:10). For Paul, “freedom” is not autonomy but the product of an allegiance that breaks the power of previously taken-for-granted (and now “alien”) norms. He is dead to the regime of the Law, since his life is derived from and governed by the Christ-event: “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (2:19–20). All other criteria of value have been discounted by the superordinate worth of belonging to Christ.

Barclay, John M. G.. Paul and the Gift (pp. 428-429). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition. 

My comments: The key to this paragraph is the last sentence: “All other criteria of value have been discounted by the superordinate worth of belonging to Christ.” This reminds me of Paul’s words “the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Phil 3:8). Because of this profound honor in knowing Christ, there is of necessity a transformation of value regarding one’s social network. Since believers belong to the incredibly worthy Christ they also belong to the family of believers. And all Christians have identities transformed by relationship with the incredibly worthy Christ.

The phrase “criteria of value” refers to the ways that people in all cultures create social hierarchies: Greek elites versus barbarian … free versus slave … insiders versus outsiders … men versus women … Jew versus Gentile … upper class, middle class, lower class … clean versus unclean … one political tribe versus another … literate or non-literate … black versus white, etc. According to Barclay, Paul is saying that any and all criteria of social value is “discounted” because knowing Christ, whose honor and worth is infinite, makes it not just possible—but vital—to have intimate fellowship with all brothers or sisters in Christ. And the emphasis is on all—without regard to social worth being higher or lower, better our worse. In relation to the all-honorable, all-glorious Christ, all believers have honorable insider status.

---

In is commentary on Galatians 1:6–12 , Barclay writes:

… Paul eschews crowd-pleasing, but the “crowd” whose opinion he dismisses is not the uneducated populace, but humanity as a whole: his arguments do not count for much among human beings, but they count before God. In his rhetoric, as in his practice, Paul’s allegiance is to Christ: “if I were still pleasing human beings, I would not be a slave of Christ” (Gal 1:10). Although Paul will celebrate “the freedom which we have in Christ Jesus” (Gal 2:5; 5:1), it is clear from this early declaration of “slavery” that what he means by freedom is the consequence of an allegiance to norms newly constituted in Christ. 

The “good news” thus realigns and recalibrates Paul’s loyalties: announcing the incongruous gift enacted in Christ, he is at odds with the normative conventions that govern human systems of value. Hence the emphatic statement of (Gal 1:11): “I want you to know that the good news announced by me is not in accord with human norms” (οὐκ ἔστιν κατὰ ἄνθρωπον). This negation is of central significance to the theology of the letter. It signals a relation of misfit, even contradiction, between the “good news” and the typical structures of human thought and behavior.

Barclay, John M. G.. Paul and the Gift (pp. 355-356). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition. 

My comments: The key sentence above is this: “The ‘good news’ thus realigns and recalibrates Paul’s loyalties: announcing the incongruous gift enacted in Christ, he is at odds with the normative conventions that govern human systems of value.” Because Paul’s allegiance is to Christ and his gospel, there is a corresponding recalibration of who and what is worthy. The gospel is not merely that persons can have eternal life by believing Jesus died for their sins. The gospel creates a new humanity (Eph 2:15), a new egalitarian community free of traditional cultural divisions and hierarchies (Gal 3:28–29)—all because of one earth-shattering reality: They are in “the Christ,” they have the astounding honor of being in God’s ancient-and-cosmic story of promise-and-blessing.

---

The two sentences below from are also from Prof. Barclay’s commentary on the first chapter of Galatians.

As a believer, Paul is a “Jew” who (in his terms) no longer remains “in Judaism”: his ethnicity has not been renounced but subsumed within an identity and an allegiance governed by the event of Christ (cf. Gal 2:19–21). His “ancestral traditions” no longer constitute his salient currency of worth.

Barclay, John M. G.. Paul and the Gift (pp. 359–360). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

My comments: I love this—“his ethnicity has not been renounced but subsumed within an identity and an allegiance governed by the event of Christ.” For Paul, his Jewishness ethnically and religiously had been his core identity before Christ. But Christ intervened. (“I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”) He is still a Jew. But Paul’s core identity has been forever altered. This Jewish part of Paul’s life was relativized—it was “subsumed”—absorbed into the life of King Jesus through “the Christ-event” (Gal 1:20).

---

These sentences are from Prof. Barclay’s commentary on Galatians 3:26–29:

Neither ethnic nor gender identity could be simply removed, and in the eyes of the [Roman] law everyone counted as either “free” or “slave” (or “freed”). Paul and Peter remained Jews (Gal 2:15; cf. Titus, a “Greek,” Gal 2:3), and Paul was still identifiably masculine and free. What is altered, however, is the evaluative freight carried by these labels, the encoded distinctions of superiority and inferiority. In common solidarity with Christ, baptized believers are enabled and required to view each other without regard to these influential classifications of worth. Jewish believers should not withdraw from shared meals with non-Jews on the basis of their different, “inferior,” ethnicity (Gal 2:11–14). Slaves should not be disdained as “mere slaves,” since their worth as “siblings” is established in Christ (Phlm 16). What now counts for worth is only one’s status in Christ, and the consistency of one’s allegiance to him.

Barclay, John M. G.. Paul and the Gift (p. 397). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

My comments: For Paul, allegiance to Christ and his gospel of grace “enabled and required” believers to have community with other believers who would normally be from social groups unlike their own. Humans are generally drawn to people like themselves, and tend to avoid being with people who are “other.” But Christians have something in common that bridges those normally entrenched social divides: the astounding incongruity of God’s grace to every Christian regardless of nationality, morality, social status, race, wealth, education, or other measure of worth.

---

In Prof. Barclay’s commentary on Romans (Section IV of Paul and the Gift), one chapter is devoted to Romans 11. On page 558 he writes:

Finally, as the preceding and following chapters make clear (e.g., Rom 6:1–23; 12:1–3), Paul’s radical emphasis on the incongruity of grace by no means implies its non-circularity: the following appeal “by the mercies of God” (12:1) may be taken to indicate that grace has “strings attached.” But the absence or lesser significance of these other perfections does not in the least diminish the radicality of the one perfection that is central to these chapters; as we have noted, the various perfections of grace are not a “package deal” (see above, chapter 2). What matters in Romans 9–11, as throughout this letter, is that God’s grace or mercy is operative without regard to worth. It is because this is the core of Israel’s identity and history that it is also the hope for the salvation of the world.

Barclay, John M. G.. Paul and the Gift (p. 558). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

Relative to grace being “with strings attached,” Prof. Barclay adds the following in his Conclusion (Chapter 18):

Thus, throughout this book, we have been suspicious of the modern (Western) ideal of the “pure” gift, which is supposedly given without strings attached. We have been able to make sense of the fact that a gift can be unconditioned (free of prior conditions regarding the recipient) without also being unconditional (free of expectations that the recipient will offer some “return”). Paul has provided a parade example of this phenomenon, since he simultaneously emphasizes the incongruity of grace and the expectation that those who are “under grace” (and wholly refashioned by it) will be reoriented in the “obedience of faith.” What has seemed in the modern world a paradoxical phenomenon—that a “free” gift can also be obliging—is entirely comprehensible in ancient terms.

Barclay, John M. G.. Paul and the Gift (pp. 562–563). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

Summary: What does allegiance have to do with GRACE? Apparently, in the ancient world, grace and allegiance was understood as a package deal. You receive undeservedly a magnificent gift (Gk., charis) from a great Patron; you return to the Patron your praise, obedience, loyalty, allegiance. This allegiance is embodied individually and corporately, physically and socially in the cultivation of a new humanity marked by counter-cultural love and diversity.

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual [reasonable] worship. (Romans 12:1 ESV)

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. (Ephesians 2:8–10 ESV)

“I pledge allegiance to the Christ.” In the early church, to confess Jesus as Lord could mean switching allegiance from Caesar to Christ; this was often subversive. What does it mean in your community to make this confession?

Next post: What does allegiance have to do with FAITH? Click here to go to the next post in this series.

---

NOTES:

1. David A. deSilva, Honor, Patronage, Kinship, & Purity: Unlocking New Testament Culture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 96. DeSilva’s two chapters on patronage are titled “Patronage & Reciprocity” and “Patronage & Grace in the New Testament.” DeSilva describes in detail how the practice of patronage in the Roman Empire informed the early church’s understanding of the gift of God’s grace in Christ.
2. J. E. Lendon. Empire of Honour: The Art of Government in the Roman World (p. 12). Kindle Edition. 
3. deSilva, 122.