Canter Bridge

For a man who occasionally becomes quite difficult to comprehend, Paul and his tradition have only the most modest tolerance for people who complicate straight-forward things.

Indeed, a case can be made that Paul’s impatience with what he calls ‘false doctrine’ is intensely pastoral. He considers that endless debate about minituae and the reflective traditions that find it necessary to fill all silences with noisy speculation confuse people who would otherwise find obedience to the truth an uncomplicated reflex. When Paul is considered to be doctrinaire, he is more often than not exercising a pastoral instinct for simplicity.

Ethics, for example. Paul is sufficiently nuanced in his appreciation of ethical dilemmas to avoid suggesting that it is always easy to know the right thing to do. Yet, for Paul, it often is. Purity is like that, he seems to think:

To the pure all things are pure, but to the corrupt and unbelieving nothing is pure.

When one reads rather odd-sounding dicta like this one within the context of pastoral literature of which Paul’s letters are an example, it becomes clear that Paul does not like to see good people confused. His approach is that of an almost Deuteronomic simplicity: there are things we are given to know and we ought to walk enthusiastically in these. There are many other things to which we are just privy. It is distracting and sometimes destructive to obsess upon those, for we have no trustworthy epistemological entry point into them and no moral compass were we actually to succeed in pressing our way in.

This is hardly obscurantism, for Paul is quite willing to probe deeply and aggressively into matters where he considers control of the data to be possible and worthy.

Yet many topics of discussion promise nothing of the sort.

Leave them alone, Paul cautions, and teach others to do the same. Not because intellectual passivity is to be sought. It most emphatically is not. But rather because a considered spiritual realism persuades the apostle that there is nothing but emptiness alongide certain paths.

Life, he suggests, is both too short and too worthy to be played at in those environs.