THE APOSTLE PAUL - Part III

In this final post on the apostle Paul (for now), I wish to examine his legacy.  It would have been interesting if the New Testament canon had been laid out chronologically . Being that Paul's letters  are the first known writings of the New Testament would have placed them in front of the gospels.  I think doing so would offer readers a different perspective on the gospels and would have allowed the reader to understand how much Paul's perspective is reflected in what became written about Jesus in the four gospels that ended up in the New Testament. 

In examining Paul's legacy, it is important to keep in mind that his writings occur within the context of the Church of Jerusalem's existence, the spiritual center of the early church, just as the Temple was the center and focal point of Judaic worship.  Christianity was very much understood by the earliest Christians to be Judaic, a part of Judaism. The link between importance of the Temple and the church in Jerusalem is undeniable.  This ultimately played a major role in the promulgating Paul's theological perspective, when both the Temple and Church in Jerusalem were destroyed in 70 CE and Paul's theological views of the church became the foundation upon which the church grew throughout the Roman Empire.

Paul's endeavor to include gentiles into the emerging early Christian church without the need for conversion to Judaism and male circumcision led to development of what I referred to as his adoption matrix, whereby every Christian was considered an adopted child of God until such time all, like the resurrected Jesus, become the raised, spiritual children of God. This was a very inventive approach that, for the first known time in Judaic history, the centerpiece of Judaism  - adherence to the law - was questioned as relevant to the concept of righteousness in the sight of God.  Paul did not take this lightly and his writings illustrate a torn individual who struggles with his past relationship to the law and it's relevance in the light of God's unmerited grace.

Paul was a rational visionary, who greatly expanded the Christian church.   His reasoning abilities provides a template for further development and has been, in fact, the inspiration for most of what is considered Christian doctrine and dogma.

As I have said in another post, the Holy Bible helps us form our questions rather than give us the answers to them.  Times change and we need to have the ability to reinterpret these ancient scriptures, much the same way the apostle Paul took liberties in redefining the meaning and purpose of Judaic law and the prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures in the light of his visionary experience which led him to embrace the unmerited grace of God.

Paul's use of logic is refreshing but is under-appreciated. He has become so mainstream today, that few realize the radical inventive way he utilized Hebrew scriptures to support his theological perspective.  Reason in religion may not be everyone's cup of tea, but Paul underscores the necessity of reason in forging a path for the good news of the risen, spiritual Jesus who becomes the Christ of God. While Paul referenced little of what Jesus taught during Jesus' ministry as recorded in the canonical gospels, he undoubtedly has helped shaped many of the teachings about Jesus.

Because Paul employed a logical and reasoned approach in his writings he also understood the limits to which he could know, to which he could reason.  His visionary experience led him to a realm of the unknowable, what some would call mystery. Even here, Paul identifies tools to utilize on this side of life that help us deal with the mystery we find ourselves in, life.  Faith, hope, and love become the centerpiece of Pauline theology, what I have referred to in other posts as the affective elements of life; that help shape our responses to what our life experiences bring.

What I have not spent a great deal of time discussing in these posts is Paul's reference to the Holy Spirit in his writings. The Holy Spirit is ubiquitous throughout Paul's epistles.  It becomes that eternal presence in our temporal existence working in, through, and with our acts of faith, hope, and love.  The Spirit of God becomes the bloodline and life force of Paul's version of the Church, the spiritualized Body of the risen Christ in this world.

The spiritual realm that Paul writes about is breathtaking in scope. It gives wide berth to expand our thinking and perspectives especially with regard to Paul's concept of God's grace which, by Paul's account, is limitless.  Neither Paul's mind nor ours can wrap themselves around such limitlessness.  Room for growth, the expansion of God's Spirit, and the ever evolving meaning of the Church as the body of Christ is evident in what Paul writes.  What limits he mentions appear based on human kind's inability to look past our dimensional perspective and limited knowledge.

As with the ministry of Jesus, I do not see Paul's work complete.  Incompleteness is woven into the very fabric of Christianity.  There is always work to be done. The "once-and-for-all-ness" of Christ's death and resurrection is not an end but rather a beginning on this side of life.  Paul's emphasis that a new creation is afoot hints at a completeness yet to come, not mission accomplished.

The apocalyptic and eschatological strains that are embedded in Christianity and in Paul's writings do not, in my opinion, necessitate having to be interpreted as they were some two thousand ago.  Paul may have been caught up into that mindset and may have been expecting a return of Christ within his lifetime ...  but maybe not.  His visionary experience opened him to the likelihood of a greater reality that breaks into our present world and co-exists with the present until such time as this world no longer exists.

Paul was capable of skepticism and at times he expressed it in roundabout ways.  If he had not been skeptical he could not have been receptive to his vision; Doubt is a key to what appears to be a locked tight mind. To apply and paraphrase a saying of Leonard Cohen, it is the crack that sometimes let's the light shine through.

Paul could not have argued Judaic law from the perspective of certainty.  He could not have put forward the affective elements of faith, hope, and love in the manner he did.  These ideas and principles did not proceed from a certain mind, but rather  a questioning one.

What permits Paul to think freely is his ultimate trust in God's faithfulness, hopefulness, and love as discovered in his vision of the risen Christ Jesus.  In this sense, Paul, more than any other person of the early church period, shaped the Christian Church we know today; a church that continues amidst its failures and setbacks.

Until next time, stay faithful



THE APOSTLE PAUL - Part II

Note: All quotations from the Holy Bible in this post are from "The Holy Bible, New International Version," Copyright 1984 by International Bible Society.  

In my last post on the apostle Paul, I focused primarily on his attempt to circumvent the Church in Jerusalem's requirement that male gentiles desiring to become Christian must first convert to Judaism.  As such, Paul views Jesus' resurrection as a reset point, God's new creation, upon which Paul  premises his adoption matrix that put both Jew and gentile followers of Jesus on equal footing as "adopted" children of God by faith rather than lineage.   In the process of making his case that faith alone in Christ Jesus as the only requirement for inclusion, Paul takes issue with Judaic law, as a whole, which was received poorly by the leaders of the Jerusalem church.  In the end, Paul manages to convince James, the brother of Jesus and head of the Jerusalem church, that circumcision was unnecessary, but James and the other leaders maintained that the law must be followed.

What we experience in reading Paul's epistles is Paul's mind at work.  Although his legal argument on Judaic law, to my mind, is a bit convoluted, Paul was making a logical argument regarding the futility in trying to meet every possible demand or requirement of Judaic law as necessary for righteousness in the light God's unmerited grace.

In this post, I will examine Paul's understanding of Jesus' resurrection and the new creation it heralded.   To do so, we must understand the impact of Paul's vision Jesus on the road to Damascus. The important fact to keep in mind was that this encounter was a vision - not a physical presence. Visions were understood in Paul's day as a spiritual rather than a mental process that one could psychoanalyze.  The spiritual, throughout most of human history, was and continues to be considered every bit as real as a physical encounter in many parts of the world and at least until the dawn of psychoanalysis in other parts.  In fact, Paul had a physical reaction to the light of Christ perceived in this vision, he became blind.

The significance of this is that the spiritual was not separated from reality or a separate reality. The spiritual was real and was not questioned in Paul's day as it is today, where we tend to view spirituality as a mental process rather than a form of being or existence in its own right.  In fact, during the time of Paul it is likely that most understood spirit as a reflection of a greater reality that physical reality was dependent on and which could and did interact with the physically mundane world from time to time.

The physically animated world was largely referred to as flesh in Judaic thought, and Paul's writings and understanding of the physical world reflects that perception.  Flesh was observed to be corruptible. When a person or an animal died, flesh would decay; therefore, the physical is impermanent and the spirit permanent.  This is key to Paul's understanding of Jesus' resurrection. In fact Paul utilizes the concepts of corruptible and incorruptible in correlation to resurrection in his epistles. Although Paul's use of these terms implied a double entendre, the basic meaning is simply there are aspects of reality that last and aspects that don't.

In Judaism, what makes humans the very image of God is that God breathed his spirit in us.  By virtue of this act, we are spiritual creatures as well as physical ones.  Paul tends to side-step this fact of Judaic theology.  The adoption matrix that Paul utilizes  is, I believe, an outcropping of the Judaic concept of the Chosen People, the children of Abraham, which Paul asserts was reconfigured at Jesus's resurrection to potentially include all people by virtue of their faith in the resurrected Christ. Paul's sidestepping of what is referred to in Judaism as the Noahide covenant is not a denial of it.  Paul's intent was to broaden the Abrahamic covenant to include all who had faith in Jesus as the risen Christ.

PAUL AND RESURRECTION

I would invite readers of this post to review with me Paul's explanation of Jesus' resurrection as found in his first letter to the church at Corinth, 1Corinthians 15. What we find here is that Paul never affirms or posits a belief in the physical resurrection of Jesus. What I believe confuses people is that Paul talks about the body or talks about mortality putting on immortality, which to most means a physical body, but Paul is not talking about the resurrection in terms of a physical body, but rather as a spiritual body.

In verses 44 through 50 of  1Corinthians 15, Paul writes:

"If there is a natural (physical*) body, there is also a spiritual body.  So it is written:  "The first man Adam became a living being;' the last Adam (Jesus*) became a life-giving spirit.   The spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and after that the spiritual.  The first man was of the dust of the earth, the second man from heaven.  As was the earthly man, so are those who are of the earth; and as is the man from heaven, so also are those who are of heaven.  And just as we have borne the likeness of the earthly man, so shall we bear the likeness of the man from heaven. I declare to you, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable." [*=my insertions]

A platonic understanding of reality  seems apparent or perhaps is being referenced in Paul's logic regarding reality. The physical world is impermanent - not all that real -  a shadowy place - a mere reflection of what truly is or meant to be "for now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror" (1Corinthians 13:12)  The spiritual world is the true reality.  The resurrection of Jesus, by being a spiritual event resulting in Jesus acquiring a spiritual non-physical body, is in a greater type of reality - a lasting reality.

Paul may have adopted some of this thinking from the Essenes, but as a Pharisee, this seems unlikely. What also seems as unlikely is that he would have acquired such a negative view of God's original creation, but somehow he did and I believe the answer resides in his Hellenized understanding of reality which was largely dualistic; there is that which now appears real but is merely a shadowy reflection and then there is that which is truly real which we cannot fully understand on this side of life.

As I mentioned in my last post, what I see Paul doing is an attempt to bridge the gaps between the two mindsets he possesses, which becomes essential to Paul's manner of coming to terms with the vision he received and his endeavor to include gentiles into the Church without the need to convert to Judaism.  The vision Paul experienced shatters his Pharisaical allegiance to the idea righteousness via compliance to Judaic law.  

The key to this shattering moment is on the voice of the "spiritualized" resurrected Jesus who says, "Saul,  Saul why do you persecute me?" Acts 9:4.

There is an answer to that question.

The reason Paul persecuted members of the early church is because as a Pharisee, he believed he was doing the right thing, complying with the letter of Judaic law, only to come to realization via his vision that he was doing something very wrong, blind to a greater reality.

In my opinion, Paul never fully recovers from that realization and is torn by what he knew prior to this vision and the realization that after this vision, he knows that he knows nothing which brings to the forefront of his thought process what can be referred to as his Greek mind.  Paul seemingly cannot resolve this disconnect with his Pharisaical past through his understanding of Judaism.  This becomes an enormous struggle for him that ironically finds a way to resolution when he sees gentiles embracing the gospel message he intends for his Jewish brethren.

The question that one speculates to have formed in the back of Paul's mind becomes why was it easier for gentiles to embrace his message rather than his own Jewish brethren.  The answer becomes obvious.  There is no legal or theological barrier preventing them to do so.  

What Paul runs up against is his own past, the intransigency of the Judaic mindset regarding the law. The leaders of these Jewish communities are not willing to give up what was holding them together, the law, and there was no easy way for Paul to argue that they should do so from the perspective of Judaic law. So Paul abandons any legal argument and introduces a philosophical, a Greek, argument instead which is based on his notion of God's reset point of creation in raising Jesus as a new spiritual creation.

While Paul cannot argue the gospel message from a legal perspective, he finds a reason to sidestep it and thus argues that all of the law's requirements have been met in Jesus' death and resurrection: "The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives , he lives to God." (Romans 6:19)

In essence, Jesus's death is the "once and for all" atonement for the sins of the world and his resurrection is God's approval who reset the creative paradigm as a result.  The basic message is that in order to become part of this new creative order one; to be on the right side of God, only has to have faith in Jesus as the risen Christ.

NOW AND THEN

This logic raises other questions:  If God has reset the creative paradigm, what had changed? Why weren't Paul's audience seeing its effect now, experiencing it in real time?  

Paul never directly addresses this, and perhaps did not see a need to at the time, but he indirectly does by regular use of the terms "now" and "then."  Chapters 12 and 13 of First Corinthians is what I configure as the "Now and Then" discourse by Paul.

What Paul describes in these chapters could be likened, in modern parlance, to a parallel universe that exist side by side that have  breakthrough points called revelations or a multiverse that has an added eternal dimension, not defined by space or time.  

Of course, Paul was not thinking any of that in his day. Instead Paul simply stays within the context of "this world and the next."  In the "now-time" or meantime of the present, the greater reality of the new creation becomes spiritualized.  It exits and has always existed due to its eternal nature and has been at work ever since the dawn of time. 

What has changed is the awareness of the new creation by the presence of God's Holy Spirit.  The Pentecost event was the point where the new creation merges with the old creation until such time the old completely passes away. 

Eschatology is very much a fixture of Christianity.  There is this time, "Now," and there will be a different time, "Then." Given the eschatological mindset at the time, especially within Judaism, with its tendency towards the apocalyptic, the concept of this world and a world to come morphs into Christian theology.  It is what Paul does with it that is of interest here.   Paul uses these terms to great effect in these two chapters.

Paul himself, introduces a mild form of skepticism, into this eschatological view.  In fact I suspect Paul in both chapters 12 and 13 addresses his own questioning mind. The result is one of  Paul's most profound works placing the present, the Now, in terms that have endured and sustained the church in its mission as Christ's presence in the world to this day.  

At this point, I would advise my readers to read First Corinthians 12 and 13.  Paul's underlying answer to all the "big" questions about how this all comes together is in essence, "I don't know.  I don't have all the answers to all the questions." 

He doesn't say that, of course, but it is there, implicit in what he provides; in his use of Now and Then.  This what I find most appealing about Paul, his honesty. 

Paul writes about what he sees and feel, but he doesn't stop there.  Paul wisely knows there is a limitation to what one sees and feels and suspects there is more than what one can see or feel within the limitation of our physical senses.

Paul sees the church made of people with various abilities and strengths.  He calls these gifts.  He also sees the church as acting, through the animating power of the Holy Spirit, as Christ's presence, Christ's risen body in the Now-world. 

Paul's concern is with what he now knows, those who have come into the church.  This becomes his focus in the Now. He doesn't pretend to have all the answers to all the questions.  It is in this unknowingness of Paul that he offers something much deeper than sight and sense.  He offers what I have referred to in past posts as the affective elements of faith, hope, and love.  In essence, Paul says that on this side of life we cannot possibly understand everything there is to understand, but that a lack of understanding should not become an obstacle to doing, or to being.  I think this is becomes one the most enduring messages of Paul to any age, but is particularly relevant to our current times. 

In observing the church's growth, he saw the effects of faith, hope and love first hand; how life-giving they are and how sustaining they are to human life.   At the end of chapter 13 of First Corinthians, Paul writes,

 "For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but then perfection comes, the imperfect disappears.  When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.  when I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.  Now* we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then* we shall see face to face.  Now* I know in part; then* I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.  And now* these three remain: faith, hope and love.  but the greatest of these is love.

[*emphasis mine]

Until next time, stay faithful.