Reprising Paul

This June Pope Benedict is due to launch a Year of the Apostle Paul to commemorate his 2000th birthday.
Paul has not always had a good press, says Mike Riddell.
The birthday, therefore, is an opportunity to reassess Paul’s place in the Christian story and note his importance for us today

Skit by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore

Dud: I think St Paul’s got a bloody lot to answer for.
Pete: He started it, didn’t he?
Dud: All those letters he wrote.
Pete: To the Ephiscans.
Dud: You know, Ah, dear Ephiscans, ah, stop enjoying yourself, God’s about the place.
Pete: Signed Paul.
You can just imagine it, can’t you? There’s a nice Ephiscan family, settling down to a good breakfast of fried mussels and hot coffee and they’re just sitting there and it’s a lovely day outside, they’re thinking of taking the children out, you know, for a picnic, by the sea, by the lake and have a picnic there and everything’s happy, the sun coming through the trees, birds are chirping away.
Dud: Boats bobbing on the ocean.
Pete: The distant cry of happy children.
Dud: Clouds scudding across the sky.
Pete: Naturally, Dud – in fact an idyllic scene is what you call it, when suddenly into the midst of it all – tap, tap, tap, on the bloody door.
Dud: What’s that?
Pete: You know what it is?
Dud: No.
Pete: They rush to the door to open it, thinking it may be good news – perhaps grandfather’s died and left them a vineyard. They open it up and what do they discover? It’s a messenger bearing a letter from Paul.
Dear George and Deirdre and family,
Stop having a good time, resign yourself no to have a picnic, cover yourself with ashes and start flailing yourselves. . .
Dud: Til further notice.
Pete: Signed Paul.

“ The conversion of Paul was no conversion at all: it was Paul who converted the religion that has raised one man above sin and death into a religion that delivered millions of men so completely into their dominion that their own common nature became a horror to them, and the religious life became a denial of life.” (George Bernard Shaw)

Paul has had a mixed press. While various documents attributed to him occupy a generous portion of the New Testament, his reputation both within and outside the church has diminished in recent generations. Jesus brought us a subversive freedom – the end of religion – while Paul turned that gospel into a new and binding doctrinal system; at least so the popular perception goes. Jesus the liberator; Paul the pious nag. Jesus pointed us to God; Paul invented Christianity.

On the surface there is evidence to support the view that Paul is both a bigot and a killjoy. Here is a man who legitimates domestic slavery, considers homosexuality an abomination, counsels wives to submit to their husbands, and regards all governing authorities as appointed by God. Furthermore, he seems to be sexually repressed, overbearing, argumentative, hectoring and suffering from some kind of depression. Many minorities have found his central position in Scripture to be a real stumbling block to their participation in the church.

Given these persistent objections to Paul, has the time come to re-evaluate his long shadow looming over Christianity? This, the official Year of St Paul as declared by Pope Benedict XVI, might provide an opportunity to reconsider whether our faith has been fundamentally distorted by the former Saul of Tarsus. Does the progress of Christianity in the Third Millennium demand a radical reappraisal of the essence of ‘The Way’ which Jesus promoted, one unsullied by Pauline taint?

It is, however, the very fact that we are celebrating 2,000 years since the birth of Paul that cautions us to dig beyond popular perceptions of the “least of all the apostles”. Our own generation has a tendency to make absolute our social perspective and thereby fail to take history seriously. We respond to historical documents as if they had been issued in a press release last week and evaluate them against contemporary cultural viewpoints. This is a form of arrogance and counts against the ability to truly listen.

So a starting point might be to give Paul the respect of examining him in his own context rather than our own. Any reading of Paul must start with the fact that he is a convert. And not just any convert: a light-blinding, equine-departing, voice-hearing, dumb-struck victim of a fundamental reversal in his life. We know that as a Pharisee he had been violently active in persecution of the followers of Jesus, regarding them as heretics within the broad stream of Judaism. To then become one of the foremost proponents of the movement he had been repressing, can only be seen as a bone–rattling change.

All converts suffer from a subsequent tendency toward dualism: that which came before is made repugnant by the new life which follows. Psychologically, converts have a need to distance themselves from their past – represented dramatically for Paul by his change of name. We should not be surprised, then, that Paul fights valiantly against any attempts to drag the movement of Jesus back into the camp of Judaism from which he now feels himself to have evolved.

The other significant point regarding Paul’s past is that he was something of a rabbi – a religious teacher. He was familiar with the inner workings of Judaism and the great texts which informed it. In short, he was uniquely equipped to become Christianity’s first theologian. Of course theologians, like the great apostle himself, are not universally loved within the church. But those who are both creative and well-versed in the tradition have a vital part to play in the transmission of faith across generations.

The great achievement of Paul was to take what was a small messianic movement within Judaism and transform it into a dynamic faith free to cross cultural and religious boundaries. The reason he is regarded as a missionary pioneer is that he understood both the universal import of Jesus and the need to do some fundamental translation in order for the gospel to be understood in new settings. It is this quality which distinguishes a dynamic faith from a culturally-bound sect.

Within Judaism it was possible to speak of Jesus Christ without confusion – the claim that Jesus was the Christ or Messiah. But naturally enough that title had no currency among Gentiles, for whom the term ‘messiah’ had no reference point. It was through Paul’s creative use of metaphor and analogy that the story of Jesus was broken open to include those who might previously have been mystified. He may have been stolid, but Paul could not be accused of lacking in imagination.

His genius was to mine the surrounding cultures for images which might convey the history-rending significance of Jesus of Nazareth. Paul spoke of redemption – the buying of slaves in the market to set them free; of atonement – God himself offering whatever recompense was necessary to bridge the divide with a fallen humanity; of victory – the Roman practice of leading processions of defeated enemies; of reconciliation – the healing of whatever wounds had marred the cosmos. Through these vibrant word pictures he communicated to the world outside of Israel.

Did he, by so doing, distort the story of Jesus? Did he change the focus from partnership with God to relationship with Jesus? Not at all. Those who contrast the mission of Jesus with the teaching of Paul neglect a significant watershed – the Resurrection. Not until then did any of the disciples or followers have any idea of the significance of this wandering Galilean. The gospel has never been that Jesus was a gentle man with wise insights – it is that he was God in the flesh, God with us. Not surprisingly, this was clearer in retrospect.

Paul did not invent Christianity – but he facilitated its spread through the Roman world through his bold and innovative reframing of it. His example is one well worth revisiting in the contemporary West – where arguably Christianity once again verges on becoming an insular sect out of touch with its surrounding world. Perhaps we need some of the dynamism of our first theologian to help us re-image the story of faith in relevant terms.

Many of the difficulties people find with the Pauline epistles come from making absolute his responses to ancient culture, rather than being willing to emulate his role of dynamic translation. An example would be the idea of substitutionary atonement, which causes moral difficulties for many today. Our task is not to reiterate it because Paul once used that analogy, but to follow him in formulating fresh images which might communicate the story as we know it.

What, then, of the claims that Paul was a social conservative, and engendered a faith which was narrow, sexist and confining? These are equally misguided and unfair. Within every society there are norms and customs to be taken as central under-pinnings to human community, together with a progressive edge where social reformers may be found at work. To suggest that everything should be equally up for grabs is anarchic and unsustainable.

In order to gain an accurate view of Paul’s place in the order of things, it is important to look not at those areas in which he reinforces that which is accepted as the norm, but at the cutting edge where he is advocating reform. In the ‘household’ passages which are often quoted as examples of the apostle’s misogyny, he is in fact promoting a decidedly liberal view. Rather than regarding marriage and family under the category of ‘property’, Paul advocates a relational approach of mutual submission.

It may seem that he still establishes a male hierarchy, but that is undermined by the reminder that husbands are to emulate Christ in his service born of love. In other words, what is sometimes read by modern readers as reinforcing chauvinism, would in his context have been viewed as radical, social revisionism which threatened the current order. Similarly his seeming approval of the institution of slavery is in fact a plea to humanise the existing social order by breaking it out of the commercial model.

Paul’s passion for mission required him to walk a difficult line. He could not expect to have freedom of travel and expression if he was regarded as a revolutionary. But it would be difficult to characterise the thrust of his work as anything other than liberating. The remarkable assertion in Galatians 3:28 that ‘there can be neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither slave nor freeman, there can be neither male nor female – for you are all one in Christ Jesus’ is a dramatic removal of prejudicial distinctions with all the splendour of the Declaration of Human Rights.

As to Paul being a killjoy, I’m not sure any of us would want to be judged on a selection of our correspondence. Certainly he appears to have been the kind of focused and somewhat obsessive individual that pioneers often are. There is little doubt that he was contentious, vigorous, persistent and dogmatic. The early church saw the need to send Barnabas to repair some of the relationships damaged along the way. But what other sort of person would have survived the privations listed by Paul, and still succeeded in growing churches?

Some of the way we evaluate Paul’s legacy to the church relates to whether the so-called Pastoral epistles are legitimately credited to his authorship. It is evident that in these later documents there is a subtle shift in tone, contributing to what I have described elsewhere as “a hardening of the ecclesiastical arteries”. The sort of theological freedom advocated so vigorously in Galatians is muted by the time we get to 1 and 2 Timothy, where there is an emphasis on order and office. Whether this is the work of a different author or simply the consequence of many years of pastoral oversight is beyond my ability to judge.

It does seem that we see documented within the New Testament the beginnings of institutionalisation and formalism, hallmarks which have beset the church ever since. To lay the weight of these on the shoulders of Paul alone would be a clear injustice. Martin Luther, who started out supporting the peasant uprising in Germany, was not much later advocating that the princes smite them with the sword. Circumstances change, and strategies often shift in response.

In this coming year of celebration of Paul, let us remember the soaring poetry of Romans 8 or Ephesians 2 in which a man beset by difficulties is still able to pen magnificent statements of theological insight, the words of which echo yet in the imagination and lead us toward Christ. Or recall the journeys he undertook and battles he fought for the cause of sharing that faith which had struck him down before lifting him up.

He deserves his place in the pantheon of apostles, however strange some of his sentiments might sound to 21st Century ears. It would seem that God knew exactly the right sort of person on which to lay a vital missionary responsibility. The chief legacy of Paul is the impetus to continue his revolution; to refuse to relinquish the universal impact of the Resurrection, and to continue finding new ways to proclaim it to a disinterested world. That would be a real celebration to honour his name.

Can anything cut us off from the love of Christ – can hardships or distress, or persecution, or lack of food and clothing, or threats of violence; as Scripture says: ‘For your sake we are being massacred all day long, treated as sheep to be slaughtered?’ No; we come through all these things triumphantly victorious, by the power of him who loved us. For I am certain of this: neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nothing already in existence and nothing still to come, nor any power, nor the heights nor the depths, nor any created thing whatever, will be able to come between us and the love of God, known to us in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom.8:35–39)