Lots of people don’t like Paul.
This Christian apostle seems too pushy, too assured of his own authority, even too misogynist for admiration. We’ve known too many like him, some sense. Indeed, his model has produced a heap of ornery practitioners of his religion.
Thanks, but no thanks.
Undoubtedly Paul can be read this way, although with deeper penetration of his writings comes the realization that such an assessment short-changes the man, no matter who one decides he really was. Yet it must be admitted, Paul is particularly aware of some facts about his life that might be considered the convenient inventions of a man bent upon control.
In the first chapter of his letter to the Galatians, we get some of this early autobiographical habit:
But when God, who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles, I did not confer with any human being, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were already apostles before me, but I went away at once into Arabia, and afterwards I returned to Damascus.
Paul is sure of his own tactical independence, a matter that must be taken in the context of his wilingness to reason, argue, and persuade over long periods of time with conversation partners who occasionally expressed their disagreement by baying for his blood. Perhaps the remarkable essence of this statement lies in his conviction that God ‘has set me apart before I was born and (then later) called me through grace’.
This is no ordinary self-assessment, though not one that is off the charts of human experience. The apostle recognizes a particular divine purpose for his life from the beginning. The New Testament’s historical materials depict Paul pursuring the outcome of this special calling, a mission to persuade non-Jews that Israel’s Messiah had come also for them, at staggering personal cost. To return for a moment to the matter of convenient facts of of self-depiction, Paul derived very little convenience from his.
Paul and people like him appear deranged in world where the unchallenged norm for ordinary life is self-preservation and comfort. They fly in the face of such assumptions, as though to live on that platform is to condemn oneself to a plain vanilla trek through the short years that are given to us with nothing to show for it in the end. Paul appears not to envy such people. Rather, it seems he might pity them.
For himself, he is sure that God’s purpose was established before he was born. He had no choice in the matter, though perhaps he might have considered returning a confident ‘no’ to the eventual experiential calling that turned him from pursuit of the young Christian churches to the costly nurturing of them.
Still, he seems a bit mad from our safe distance. Unless wholeness of mind is something far different than we have dreamt. Then it might be we who are a bit off.
Being a female growing up in a very conservative Christian tradition I learned to dislike and, dare I say it, dismiss Paul.
In later years and with some more nuanced and intelligent teaching on his letters I have discovered Paul the man and hold this passionate, wildly intelligent, impossibly energetic, and deeply tender Holy Campaigner firmly in my affections.
Thanks for your comment, Sue. You describe quite a transformation in your understanding of Paul. Would ‘undomesticated but enthralling’ describe how you view him now?
Domesticity is often quite “thralling” in my experience. 🙂
Undomesticated – yes -in the sense that presenting Paul as the neat bearer of a theological system is common but so inadequate to the man and the expression of his thought.
Undomesticated is mostly always enthralling. Hearing the man’s pain in dealing with his beloved Corinthians as he lets loose in the final chapters of the 2nd letter is very moving. I don’t believe it is mere rhetoric on his part.
Discovering more of the communities among whom Paul’s theology was developed, articulated and shaped enriches my understanding of his passionate expression. The breathless enthusiasm of such long sentences as we find in Eph 1:15ff communicate Paul’s faith so infectiously.
I suppose (and I don’t know if this is heretical- forgive me – I have had no theological training) that realising the embodied character of Paul’s faith, its historical situation as opposed to a timeless but somewhat sterile set of beliefs warms my heart and aids my hearing.
Dear domesticated/undomesticated Sue,
You nicely describe a journey towards Paul that might be a subset of a larger journey towards faith-in-a-person over against faith-in-a-static-system. It’s one that many of us have found satisfying. In the light of your first four paragraphs, I’d counsel you to delete the parenthetical statement of your fifth. You clearly have theological formation of an admirable quality.