Elle and Phil, I am hoping to cover the comments of both of you in this reply, for you both want to navigate around Paul’s strong objection to circumcision by confining it to the issue of justification by the keeping of the Law, rather than by grace; or the practice of a legalism that involves upholding the letter of the Law, rather than the spirit of the Law. If you live in a culture that practices male circumcision, this interpretation gets you off the hook, so it is bound to be popular. However, as reinforcing as that cultural comfort may be, it does not stand up to progress in New Testament studies over the past few centuries.
In a nutshell, Paul’s objection to the Law and circumcision derives from an eschatological interpretation of the events of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. Eschatology, which comes from the Greek word “eschaton”, is a study of things relating to the end of time. It is sometimes called an apocalyptic worldview. In the time of Jesus and Paul, Jews believed that the world would come to an end with the last judgement, the resurrection of the dead and the eschatological gift of the Holy Spirit. For Paul and other early Christians, Jesus’ resurrection was seen as the dawn of the general resurrection and thus of the dawn of the Age to Come.
One can see the eschatological interpretation of Jesus’ resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15 where Paul portrays Jesus’ resurrection as the “first fruits” of an ongoing event which includes the general resurrection of believers. Paul and other New Testament authors share in this view that the end has become an extended event. It is a bit like looking at a mountain range from afar and seeing it as a single point but discovering on arrival at that point that the mountain range goes on for a ways. This extension of the “End” by New Testament authors gives rise to what theologians call the tension “between the already and the not yet”.
So where does the Christian life stand in this tension of “the already and the not yet”? For Paul, the Christian life is lived out in the power of this eschatological event, not with the tools of the Old Covenant. Paul makes this clear in Romans where he says,
“If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.” (Romans 8:11 NRS)
And earlier in that same letter he says,
“Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore, we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” (Romans 6:3-4 NRS)
These statements by Paul make it clear that the Christian life is lived in the power of the resurrection, and thus, in the power of the Age to Come. There is still a final consummation to come in New Testament theology, often referred to as the “Second Coming”, but the Christian life involves a dip into the eschatological Spirit. (No pun intended.) Thus, Paul can say that the “end of the ages has come upon us”. (1 Corinthians 10:11) By way of comparison, the old way of the Law has become obsolete.
The problem with this eschatological (or apocalyptic) world view is that it soon came into disrepute. Not simply because the expected follow-up events did not come in short time, but because some people were endlessly predicting the end of the world on a certain date and proved to be wrong. The whole area of eschatology became an embarrassment. I can sympathize with that embarrassment. As an advanced amateur astronomer I can only cringe when fundamentalist Christians take the blood-red eclipsed Moon as a sign that the end is about to come, knowing full-well that the red color is caused by the refraction of red sunlight by the Earth’s atmosphere into the Earth’s shadow and onto the Moon. (The blue sunlight is scattered.) It has been happening ever since there was a Moon and an atmosphere on Earth.
Because of this embarrassment, Christians began to interpret their Scriptures without reference to the eschatological beliefs of their authors. With each attempt they got further away from the original meaning. Originally the Law referred to the Law of Moses - the statutes and case laws, as well as the lore, in the first five books of the Bible. This eventually became diluted into a discussion of law in the generic sense, and its relationship to grace. So what I am saying is that if you really want to understand what the authors of the New Testament were on about, you need to put your objections to their eschatology on the back-burner and “go with the flow”.
Because of this foundation in Christian eschatology, Paul can say of the Law of Moses and its practice of circumcision, “what once had glory now has no glory” (2 Corinthians 3:10). Thus Paul is free to now call circumcision “mutilation’ (Philippians 3: 2).