The Law In Galatians

One verse, two readings, and a dispute that ran for two years before anyone reached Minneapolis. Here is the case each side actually made — from the pamphlet and the commentary themselves, not from anyone’s summary of them.

A study on Righteousness By Faith · Arthur Baldwin · StandUp4Jesus.Org · 16 min read

Most accounts of this dispute describe one side and summarize the other. That is not anyone’s dishonesty — it is what the sources made easy. E. J. Waggoner’s books stayed in print for a century. G. I. Butler’s eighty-five-page pamphlet did not, and for a long while the only widely available account of his argument was written by people answering it.

Both documents are now readable. This study quotes each man from his own pages.

The Verse Everything Turned On

“Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith. But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster.”

Galatians 3:24, 25

Read that with the eyes of a people whose entire public work was the perpetuity of God’s law, and the difficulty is immediate. If the schoolmaster is the Ten Commandments, then Paul has just said we are no longer under them — and every opponent of the Sabbath had been saying exactly that for forty years, with this verse in hand.

So which law did Paul mean? That is the whole question, and it is worth saying plainly that it is a question of interpretation, not of loyalty. Butler said so himself in his opening pages, and his statement of the problem is as fair as anything written since.

Butler’s Case, At Full Strength

George Ide Butler was president of the General Conference. In 1886 he published The Law in the Book of Galatians: Is It the Moral Law, or Does It Refer to that System of Laws Peculiarly Jewish? — eighty-five pages, from the Review and Herald press. He opens by laying out the two laws his people distinguished: the moral law with the duties growing out of it, and the ceremonial law with its typical remedial system pointing forward to Christ. Then he frames the question, without heat:

“We hold the former to be ever binding upon man, while the latter passed away. Our inquiry is now as to which of these laws the apostle has principally in view in the letter to the Galatians. The question is an important one, and is therefore well worthy of consideration.”

G. I. Butler · The Law in the Book of Galatians (1886), p. 8

His argument then rests on a single word of Paul’s, and it is a good argument. Two verses before the schoolmaster, Paul says this:

“Wherefore then serveth the law? It was added because of transgressions, till the seed should come to whom the promise was made; and it was ordained by angels in the hand of a mediator.”

Galatians 3:19

Added. And till. Butler drives at both:

“The law ‘added because of transgressions’ unmistakably points to a remedial system, temporary in duration, ‘till the seed should come.’”

G. I. Butler · The Law in the Book of Galatians (1886), p. 45

Sit with the force of that. A law that was added at a point in time cannot be the law that was written with God’s own finger and is a transcript of His character — that one was not added, because it never began. And a law that runs until the Seed arrives is by definition temporary, while the Ten Commandments are by definition not. Two features of Paul’s own sentence, both pointing the same way.

Paul reinforces the timing himself four hundred and thirty years after Abraham (Galatians 3:17) — Sinai, not Eden. Butler’s reading is not a dodge invented to protect the Sabbath. It is a straightforward account of the chapter’s own vocabulary, and anyone who waves it away has not read him.

Why He Was Not Merely Being Stubborn

There is one more sentence on that eighth page, and it explains the whole two years better than any account of temperaments could:

“…the truth concerning the law in Galatians is especially so, because the apostle’s references to the law in this letter are used by our opponents as a strong support to their Antinomian doctrines.”

G. I. Butler · The Law in the Book of Galatians (1886), p. 8

That is the honest answer to the question modern readers ask first — why did they fight so hard over one verse? Because Galatians was the weapon being used against them, week after week, in print and from platforms. Butler was not defending a hobby. He was holding a wall that was actually under attack, and he had watched men leave the message through the breach that verse made.

Understand that, and the resistance at Minneapolis stops looking like obstinacy and starts looking like what it was: men who had been guarding a position for decades, being told by two young editors that the guard had been posted at the wrong gate.

Waggoner’s Answer: Not A Schoolmaster

Waggoner did not answer by softening the law. He answered by attacking the English translation of the verse everyone was arguing about.

First, the words to bring us are marked in both the old version and the revised as supplied by the translators rather than written by Paul — so he dropped them. Then he went at schoolmaster itself. The Greek is paidagogos, and Waggoner’s point is that it never meant a teacher at all. It was:

“…the slave who accompanied the boys to school to see that they did not play truant. If they attempted to run away, he would bring them back, and had authority even to beat them to keep them in the way. The word has come to be used as meaning ‘schoolmaster,’ although the Greek word has not at all the idea of a schoolmaster. ‘Taskmaster’ would be better.”

E. J. Waggoner · The Glad Tidings (1900), p. 148, 149

His preferred rendering, borrowed from the German and Scandinavian translations, was blunter still: master of a house of correction — in plain English, a jailer.

And this was not a late idea of his. The argument was already in print in the Signs of the Times in the summer of 1886 — before Butler’s pamphlet answered it, and two years before anyone reached Minneapolis:

“Take notice that in every case of just imprisonment it is the law that seizes the criminal, shuts him up, and keeps him confined until his trial and execution. The sheriff, jailer, and executioner are only agents of the law. It is the strong arm of the law that gives power to the prison walls and bolts.”

Signs of the Times, August 26, 1886, p. 518

And there — fourteen years before the commentary, and in language his later books never bettered — the two figures are reconciled rather than opposed:

“The reader will notice that the idea that the law acts as a jailer to sinners does not conflict with the idea that it also acts as a tutor, or pedagogue. It acts as pedagogue by virtue of its office as jailer. As jailer it shuts us up in a stronghold from which we cannot escape. Now the more galling this imprisonment is made, the more our desire to escape is increased; and since there is no means of escape except through faith in Jesus Christ, it follows that the more of a jailer we feel the law to be, the more of a pedagogue it becomes, forcing us to flee for refuge to the hope set before us.”

Signs of the Times, August 26, 1886, p. 518

So the jailer does not replace the schoolmaster. The law teaches by holding. It is a tutor precisely because it is a warder, and the harder the confinement presses, the more surely it drives the prisoner to the only door — which is exactly what Paul says it was given to do.

A note on that citation. The 1886 piece is unsigned, on the editorial page of a paper whose masthead then listed E. J. Waggoner along with J. H. Waggoner and S. N. Haskell. Its argument and vocabulary match his signed work closely, but an unsigned editorial is not a signature, so it is cited here to the paper rather than to the man. What it establishes either way is the date: this reading was published, and answerable, two years before the session that is supposed to have sprung it.

And that changes what under the law can mean. Here is his conclusion, and it is the hinge of the entire dispute:

“To be under the law is identical with being under sin. We are under the law solely because we are under sin. … Those who are under the law, therefore, are the transgressors of the law. The righteous are not under it, but are walking in it.”

E. J. Waggoner · The Glad Tidings (1900), p. 148

Read it twice, because it dissolves the fear that met the message. To be under the law is to be in its custody as a lawbreaker. A believer released from that custody has not been released from the commandments — he has been let out of the cell and set walking in them. The law loses a prisoner and gains a keeper.

Nobody’s Sabbath is endangered by that sentence. Which is precisely what the men holding the wall needed to hear, and precisely what the manner of the meeting made it hard for them to hear.

A Mirror, And A Jailer

There is an older and simpler figure for what the law does, and it is not Paul’s — it is James’s:

“For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass: for he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was. But whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed.”

James 1:23-25

A mirror. That is probably the truest short answer to what the Ten Commandments do, and it is worth noticing that it does not compete with Waggoner in the slightest. A mirror shows a man his condition with perfect accuracy and has never once washed a face. That is exactly Paul’s point two verses before the schoolmaster — “if there had been a law given which could have given life, verily righteousness should have been by the law” — and exactly Waggoner’s. The glass diagnoses. It does not cure. Anyone who has understood the mirror has already understood why righteousness cannot come by the law, and has understood it without needing a word of Greek.

Where the two figures differ is in what they add, and the difference is worth having. A mirror is passive. It shows, and then it lets you walk away — which is precisely James’s complaint about the man who beholds himself and straightway forgets. Paul’s paidagogos is active. It does not merely reveal; it holds:

“But before faith came, we were kept under the law, shut up unto the faith which should afterwards be revealed.”

Galatians 3:23

Kept. Shut up. The mirror tells you what you are; the jailer sees to it that you cannot pretend otherwise and cannot wander off. Both are true of the same law, and a reader who holds both has the whole of it — the glass that will not flatter, and the custody that will not release its prisoner to anyone but the One who paid for him.

And now the rule that follows, which every careful reader of this controversy arrives at sooner or later: anything that undermines the importance of God’s Ten Commandments cannot be according to God’s will. That is sound, and it is not negotiable.

But hold it beside what you have just read about Butler, because this is the uncomfortable part. That rule, correctly stated, is exactly the rule he was applying. He believed the new reading undermined the law, and he was defending it for that reason and no other. The rule did not fail him. What the rule could not do — what no rule can do by itself — is tell the difference between a teaching that lowers the law’s claim and a teaching that moves where righteousness comes from while leaving the claim exactly where it was.

Waggoner’s reading does the second and not the first. It raises the law’s demand to the point where no human effort can reach it, and then supplies the reaching from Christ. The commandments do not lose an inch. But telling those two apart takes more than a principle — it takes reading the man carefully enough to see which one he is actually saying, and that is the labor the meeting at Minneapolis would not do.

What Ellen White Said About The Question Itself

Both sides appealed to her. What she actually said about the Galatians question will surprise readers on both sides of it still.

She insisted the discussion continue. Asked whether the matter should drop after Waggoner had presented his views, she answered plainly:

“By no means. We want all on both sides of the question.”

Ellen G. White · The Ellen G. White 1888 Materials, p. 219

She did not endorse Waggoner’s position on the law in Galatians. Writing to the assembled brethren at Minneapolis, she endorsed his manner and the light in his preaching while reserving judgment on this very point:

“Dr. Waggoner has spoken to us in a straightforward manner. There is precious light in what he has said. Some things presented in reference to the law in Galatians, if I fully understand his position, do not harmonize with the understanding I have had of this subject; but truth will lose nothing by investigation.”

Ellen G. White · The Ellen G. White 1888 Materials, p. 163

That is a careful sentence and it deserves to be quoted whole rather than halved. People who want her endorsing Waggoner stop after precious light. People who want her defending the old position stop after do not harmonize. She said both, in one breath, and then asked for investigation.

And when someone in the meeting declared that the whole message stood or fell on the Galatians question, she refused it outright:

“The question at issue is not a vital question and should not be treated as such. The wonderful importance and magnitude of this subject has been exaggerated.”

Ellen G. White · The Ellen G. White 1888 Materials, p. 220

The remark she was answering had been, in her own record of it: “If our views of Galatians are not correct, then we have not the third angel’s message, and our position goes by the board; there is nothing to our faith.” Her reply — “This statement is not true. It is an extravagant, exaggerated statement” — is the sharpest thing she says in the whole account, and she says it to the side that thought it was defending her.

The Test She Applied Instead

Having set the exegetical question aside as not vital, she applied a different test entirely — and it is the one sentence from this whole controversy most worth carrying out of it:

“But if we have had the truth upon this subject our brethren have failed to be sanctified through it; the fruits are not after Christ’s order, but bitter as gall.”

Ellen G. White · The Ellen G. White 1888 Materials, p. 189

Notice what that concedes and what it refuses. It concedes the possibility that the traditional reading was correct — if we have had the truth upon this subject. And it refuses to let that settle anything, because a right position held in a wrong spirit had produced fruit that was bitter as gall.

You can win an exegetical argument and fail the only examination that matters. That is not a comfortable thing for any of us who enjoy being right.

What Was Actually At Stake

Five years later, at the General Conference session of 1893, a speaker looked back at Minneapolis and said the same thing she had said in the room:

“But, it was not a meeting to discuss theological points, that was not what the Spirit of God meant to teach us. … What did the Lord want to teach us back there? He wanted to teach us the righteousness by faith…”

General Conference Daily Bulletin, 1893, p. 218

And then, in the same breath, the thing itself: “It was not to discuss the question of whether the third chapter of Galatians meant the moral law or the ceremonial law.”

So the Galatians question was the occasion of the crisis and not its substance. It was the ground the armies happened to be standing on when the real question arrived — and the real question was never which law is the schoolmaster. It was whether a commandment-keeping people would receive a righteousness they had not produced.

That is why a study of the exegesis alone will always come away puzzled at the heat. The heat was never proportionate to the verse. It was proportionate to what the verse was standing in front of.

How To Hold It Now

Three things follow, and they are worth more than a verdict.

The reading has largely settled toward Waggoner, and that settles less than people think. Adventist exposition today generally takes the schoolmaster to include the moral law, and the reasons are the ones he gave. But a person can hold that reading with a spirit that fails the very test Ellen White applied to the men who held the other one. Being on the winning side of an 1888 argument is not a spiritual attainment.

Butler deserves to be read before he is dismissed. He was defending a position under live attack, with a real argument from Paul’s own vocabulary, and his pamphlet’s opening pages are more careful than most of what has been written about him since. Whoever quotes him only as the man who was wrong has not done the work.

And the question that mattered was never settled by the exegesis at all. She said it in the room and it was said again five years later: the subject before them was righteousness by faith, and the law in Galatians was the doorway they were arguing in rather than the house they were being invited into.

The doorway is worth understanding. It is not worth standing in.