THE APOSTLE PAUL
His Career and Theology
Published by Edwin Walhout
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2010 Edwin Walhout
Cover design by Amy Cole (amy.cole@comcast.net)
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Biblical quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
21 A SECOND LETTER TO THESSALONICA
23 THE CORINTHIAN CORRESPONDENCE
24 THE LETTER TO THE CHURCH IN ROME
29 A LETTER TO THE CHURCH IN COLOSSAE
30 THE LETTER CALLED EPHESIANS
35 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO PAUL: SUMMATION
Paul was raised in a strict Pharisaic home in Tarsus, a prominent city on the southern coast of what is now Turkey. As such he acquired the unique understanding of God that is the essential part of the Jewish heritage. That understanding involved at least two major parts: a) God as the sovereign creator and lord of the entire universe, and b) God as the giver of the covenantal law, the Torah, to the people of Israel. As a converted Jew Paul built upon that foundation and shows how God now sends his Son Jesus as the Jewish messiah to be the savior of the whole world, Gentiles as well as Jews.
Having been raised in a Jewish home in the middle of the pagan Greek world, Paul learned early how to relate to people of non-Jewish background, people who were foreign to the unique religious traditions of Judaism. This early childhood experience was excellent preparation for his later forays into that pagan world with the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. He was confident, not afraid to confront the religious and philosophical opinions of that polytheistic world. He did his best to help graft those non-Jewish believers into the tree represented by the Jewish race.
But his conversion while on a dastardly errand to Damascus altered much of Paul’s early Pharisaic outlook on life, putting into divine perspective all the religious opinions he had inherited as well as the recent disturbing things he himself had experienced in connection with Jesus and the early church. He remained a loyal and practicing Jew all the while he was a Christian apostle, finding that he need not abandon his heritage but only to adjust its parameters to embrace fully the Lord Jesus as the Jewish messiah promised ages before.
Far from writing abstract theological speculation, Paul explained his theology not so much in logical language as in terms of its practical application to the lives and views of those who believed in Jesus. Accordingly, we find his theology embedded not in systematic books of abstract theology but in intensely existential letters of advice and explanation to the struggling churches he founded. It will be important for us to retain that vivid and existential connection to real life conditions when we examine the theological insights of the Apostle Paul. That will mean that we do not rest content to perceive the logic of Paul but also, and more importantly, the difference that theology makes for our total lifestyle, the way we think and live and obey the Lord.
Many of us have some difficulty in getting a picture of the world and of history that moves beyond our own immediate circle of people. We come into the world concerned mainly with ourselves, what to eat and where to live and how to live with others in our family and how to spend our time and money. Self-centered. We slowly grow beyond that and begin to see things in perspective of a larger group, maybe our family’s interests, or our church’s interests, our city, our state, our country.
What Christians come to as they mature is to see life and its concerns in the light of God, not merely of our own human desires and ambitions. We learn to ask, What is God doing? What does God want us to do and to be? We become theists, trying to understand the world and our own times in the light of the larger view of what God, who created it all, wants to have happen.
Paul too learned those things, becoming a Christian and then bringing his unique talents into line with what God is accomplishing in this world through his Son Jesus. He learned to see himself as nothing as compared with the all-important worth of seeing what God was doing through the gospel and the Spirit of Jesus. What happened to him was not important; what the gospel accomplished was.
Paul was a thorough-going theist. That means he understood not only that God created the whole world but also that, having created it, he continues to work in such a way as to achieve his original purpose in bringing human beings into existence. That purpose is to have the entire human race live as his image as it goes about gaining mastery over the earth and its potential.
Theism means to recognize that everything that happens must be understood in connection with God’s purpose.
2. PAUL’S EARLY LIFE UNDER THE TORAH
We know little about the actual conditions of how Paul was brought up in Tarsus. It is reasonable to assume, however, that in his Jewish home he learned how to read Hebrew, the Jewish scriptures, as well as to use the Greek language of the city. Just as Christian children today are taught to know Genesis, for example, we may well assume that Paul had the same advantage, learning about God and creation and Adam and Noah and Abraham. Surely he would have learned about Moses and David and the troubled history of Israel and Judah, culminating in exile. Paul would have learned, for example, that he himself was a scion of the tribe of Benjamin. All of this would have inculcated in him a deeply felt and intensely imbibed sense of the sovereign presence and power of God, as well as of the uniqueness of the Jewish people.
Young Paul would have understood and accepted that his people, the Jews, were especially blessed by God to know and follow God’s law, the Torah. God has selected, for reasons he himself only knows, the Jewish people for the purpose of bringing the entire human race back to its own best interests, back to the purpose for which God created human beings in the beginning. The way God did this was to provide them with his law, giving concrete guidance and direction to all of the Jewish affairs of life.
Paul absorbed that point of view very powerfully in his young life, committing himself with all his growing mental and moral power to further the progress and authority of the law God himself gave for the betterment of human life.
That world-and-life-view based on the covenantal law of Moses was the decisive and formative influence in Paul’s early life not only in Tarsus but also in his teen years as a rabbinical student in Jerusalem. In Jerusalem, that holy city of the Jews, Paul himself boasted that he made more progress in religious studies than all of his colleagues in the student body.
That commitment is what drove him to persecute the early Christians after the time of Jesus on earth. Obedience to the law of God is what guarantees not only the favor of God but the welfare of God’s people. No deviation allowed. No freedom from its demands. Obedience. Submission. That is what motivated adolescent Paul before his conversion.
It is also what explains his fanaticism prior to his conversion. Paul loved the Torah so much that he hated anything and everyone whom he perceived to undermine or belittle that law. God gave us his own definition of what he wants from us and it is our duty to put that requirement above all else in our lives. That was Paul’s motivation.
Paul perceived Jesus and his followers to belittle the importance of the Torah, and when he became old enough to take some responsibility for it he offered himself to do what he could to destroy this new movement. In his fanatic zeal for the law Paul led a deputation to Damascus to identify and arrest some individuals who seemingly abandoned the Jewish tradition to follow this false messiah Jesus.
We do not know precisely what was going on in Paul’s mind as he was traveling that long distance from Jerusalem to Damascus for the purpose of arresting Jews who had abandoned their heritage, as he thought, for the new and unproven messiah Jesus.
Why would anyone do that, he may have been thinking. What loyal Jew, having the security of God’s own law, would diminish its importance and commit to a person shown to be wrong by being condemned and then executed as a false messiah? The Sanhedrin examined him, did they not, and decided his claim to be our messiah king was absurd. If the people who know about such things made that determination, why would any of us challenge it?
Yet Paul may have been thinking also about the stories that were circulating about this man Jesus. People say he did some unusual things, but I don’t know whether to believe them or not. Who could walk on water without sinking? Who could make a boy’s brownbag lunch serve a whole crowd of people? They even say he rose from the dead, and everybody knows that simply can’t be done. If he rose from the dead, then where is he? Where does he live? Nobody knows, so it can’t be true. Of course, there is Lazarus. People say he died and was buried but Jesus raised him to life. I know Lazarus isn’t dead now, but whether he was once really dead at all I have my doubts. But how anyone could think this Jesus is God’s Son, the man God is sending to deliver us from Roman oppression, is hard to imagine. That is one thing for sure; he didn’t get rid of the Romans and he did not set up a kingdom with himself as king. That proves he isn’t our messiah. How could these people believe he is?
Very likely such thoughts were challenging Paul’s mind, back and forth, trying to understand these pesky and dangerous people who called themselves followers of the Way. None of it makes any sense, Paul was thinking. I have to help put an end to it.
Then, after a long day in the hot sun, Paul suffered a heatstroke. He fell off his donkey, blinded by the stroke, and had to be led by the hand into the city where he could do nothing at all about his intended purpose of arresting deviant Jews.
Paul understood what happened as Jesus himself appearing to him. That, at any rate, is how Luke reports the incident. Who are you, Lord? asks Paul in his abject blindness. I am Jesus whom you are persecuting. What then do you want me to do? Just go into the city and things will work themselves out. You will be told.
In Damascus blind Paul receives ministrations from one of the men whom he had come to arrest. How difficult it must have been for this stranger, Ananias, to come to the aid of the person whom everyone knew was their enemy. But somehow God enabled Ananias to do so, understanding that this poor helpless creature Paul, once so proud and so intimidating, was now ready to change and to become one of Jesus’ disciples.
In later years, as Paul reflected on this catastrophic experience at Damascus, he developed the most decisive theological insight of his entire life. He came to see that this was his way of experiencing personally the death and resurrection of Jesus.
He came to see, first, that his life prior to conversion, with all its fanatic loyalty to the Torah of God, had in fact been for him a kind of spiritual death. He recognized that his devotion to the law had in fact obscured the larger dimensions of what God wants from his people. He came to see that just going through the motions of the religious observances and ceremonies of the Torah contributed very little to making people genuine images of God. People could do such things very devotedly but still in their inner hearts be out for themselves rather than for God. In fact, he observed, it was this very devotion to the law, making it central to Jewish life, that persuaded the rulers of the people to condemn Jesus and demand his death. All of that, Paul learned in later life, demonstrated that the law itself, used this way, was the very opposite of what God wanted. What good does it do, Paul asked himself, to be so very diligent as I was to observe all the details of the law, only to be found opposing the greater will of God as defined by the messiah he sent to give us a deeper and more profound sense of obedience? Paul concluded that this was, in fact, spiritual death, in spite of its supposed devotion to the law of God.
Then, second, Paul came to understand that his new life, after conversion, was what really constitutes life itself, that is, that it is the way God wants all people to live, true life, not mere existence. People, left to themselves as non-Jewish people were, often live by self-interest only, and hence are often at odds with other people who are living for their own selfish interests. That would account for all kinds of sin and evil entering into human life and civilization. So Paul came to see that the kind of life he has now begun to live as a follower of Jesus is the kind of life God wants for everyone, regardless of national origin. It defines basic humanity as created by God. It makes people good not only on the outside but especially on the inside.
Then, thirdly, Paul saw the transition from one to the other as resurrection. Resurrection, defined in this way, means passing out of death into life. Paul experienced this profound passage in his own life during those terrible weeks of recovery in Damascus. It was not at all easy for Paul to abandon the commitment he had been so zealous in cultivating his entire life, and it actually took him years to come to the point where he could truly act upon it fruitfully. The spiritual resurrection he underwent was nonetheless very real and very determinative of his future career. It took a very long time to come to maturity, but when it did Paul became the most influential person ever in the proclamation of the gospel. Throughout his later career as an apostle to the Gentiles Paul used this experience of his, passing out of death into life – resurrection – as one of the determinative insights of the gospel he preached.
Fourthly, Paul came to understand that this conversion experience, passing out of spiritual death into eternal life, needs to be understood as the way all believers share in the death and resurrection of Jesus. To believe in Jesus is, in a way, to die with him and to rise with him. That happens when a person repents of a sinful way of life and commits to a spiritual way of life through faith in Jesus. The old way of life, with its selfishness and petty gripes, gives way to a new way of living that enables us to grow, to expand, to develop, to mature, to love and be loved, to blossom into the fullness of the image of God for which we were created in the beginning. A religion dominated by obedience to rules does not do this, does not succeed in producing a vital and vibrant person who images the very virtues of God himself. Paul experienced this, and he preached that everyone who believes in Jesus should experience that same liberating and empowering spirit of Jesus, passing out of death into life, sharing in this way the death and resurrection of Jesus.
Paul did not become a mature Christian overnight. No one does. It took time, years in fact, for Paul to assimilate the gospel of the Lord Jesus in such a way that it controlled everything he did and said. We remember Paul as the great apostle to the Gentiles, but it was not until ten years after his conversion that he began those apostolic trips for the gospel.
For Paul had to change his entire way of thinking, and then he had to adjust his daily routine in accordance with that change of thinking. That does not happen in a day or in a month or even in a year. It is a lifelong process, and Paul remained open to the leading of the Spirit his entire life.
As a matter of fact, early on, Paul had to submit himself so thoroughly to the leading of the Spirit of Jesus that he had to be content with waiting, waiting until it became clear just exactly what God was calling him to do. Think about those people in Jerusalem who knew Paul before his conversion. His former friends among the rabbis and Pharisees would be appalled at the man they saw return to Jerusalem from that trip to Damascus. They would hate him the same way Paul had hated Christians earlier. Now Paul was one of the enemy.
But think also about the despised Christians in Jerusalem who also saw Paul return from his ill-fated trip. What would Peter and John and James and Andrew and Matthew think about Paul? Would they trust him or would they suspect he just might be pretending so that he could arrest them also?
So when Paul finally did get back to Jerusalem after three years being away, nobody really trusted him. There was no point in his staying in Jerusalem any longer. He could not serve the rabbis, and the Christians did not need him or want him. What would he do?
Not seeing anything else to do, Paul went back home to Tarsus. What would he do in Tarsus? He would, for one thing, have to make a living for himself, even if he did return to live in his parents’ home. Perhaps he learned the trade of making tents. Perhaps his father had such a business and Paul may well have become his assistant, much as Jesus had learned carpentry or stone masonry from his father. What we do know is that he did, from time to time even in his apostolic travels, help to gain finances by working at that craft of making tents.