Canter Bridge

Pauline phrases reverberate in literal translation through hearts and minds that have been attuned to the apostle’s vocabulary and cadence. Take, for example, the alliterative spotlight that Paul casts upon divine life with a clause that anchors human destiny to the motor that is divine love: ‘out of the great love with which he loved us’.

The potency of the apostle’s letters traces its origin in part to the single-minded tenacity with which he establishes the divine character as the cause of all that is good. He manages this by way of some famous antitheses: life/death, grace/law, wrath/love. Over and again, Paul risks placing all his rhetorical and theological eggs in one basket. He stands stubbornly upon just one scale of the two that others hold in delicate equilibrium, as though to say that nuance and balance are achievable only after one has understood the unbalanced intrusiveness of divine compassion.

One discerns such radical clarity in prose like this:

You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once lived, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient. All of us once lived among them in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else. But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

Any version of Christian faith that has listened carefully to Paul will find its dialect peppered with adjectives like ‘all’ and ‘none’, ‘dead’ and alive’. In the Pauline economy, these are the syllables of grace. To begin elsewhere would for Paul and for his profound and formative impress upon the legacy of Christian faith be a fateful error at the very earliest stage of the quest to understand the salvific dance of God and his humanity.

For Paul, the matters of Christian hope and of the odd, textured, manifold experience we call salvation can begin only in the world-changing love of God. It is all or nothing, militantly exclusive of human effort and achievement.

We’ll get to those latter items in good time, Paul seems to say. All in good time. To begin with them would be to fall prey to the generational, sinister, demoniacal idolatry that is human pride. There is nothing in that. No good. All death, anger, wrath, rebellion, frustration, despair.

All or nothing.