CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 14
Man of Vision and Man of Action
1. A strange experience
Towards the end of the largely unchronicled interval between Paul’s return to Tarsus and his call to Antioch he had a strange experience which left its mark on him for the rest of his life. He gives some account of it in 2 Corinthians 12:2–10, where he says that it happened fourteen years before the time of writing. Since the time of writing was about A.D. 56, the date of the experience would have been A.D. 42 or 43. The experience belongs to the category which is commonly designated ecstatic, but it is difficult to come to a definite conclusion about its nature because Paul himself describes it in such vague terms. What he says is that “whether in the body or out of the body”—a question to which he can give no answer—he found himself rapt to the extraterrestrial realm variously called “paradise” and “the third heaven”1 and there heard things impossible and impermissible to put into words.
This type of experience, described in this kind of language, is not unparalleled in Paul’s world. We have a literary parallel in the account of Enoch’s bodily transportation into the celestial realms and his return to earth (1 Enoch 12:1 ff.; cf. 71:1 ff.). But whereas we are told quite particularly what Enoch saw and heard, Paul gives no such details: what he heard was incommunicable. In his account of the experience itself he stands outside it and relates it as if it had happened to a third party—to “a man in Christ” whom he once knew or, even more vaguely, to “So-and-so”. Only when the normal mode of existence has been resumed and he describes the sequel does he continue the narrative in the first person singular.
As a parallel from real life rather than apocalyptic literature we have the story of four rabbis—Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, Elisha ben Abuyah and Aqiba (all of whom flourished in the earlier part of the second century A.D. and so were two generations younger than Paul)—who entered Paradise. Ben Azzai looked and died, Ben Zoma looked and went mad, Elisha ben Abuyah became an apostate. Only Aqiba survived the experience unscathed.2 What exactly is meant by their entry into Paradise is a matter of debate, but some mystical experience is probable in their case as in Paul’s. The point of the story is that such an experience is perilous and liable to leave its mark indelibly on one who undergoes it.
Paul did not escape from this experience of his unscathed, but because of the spirit in which he accepted its disagreeable consequences, they became a blessing to him instead of a curse (2 Cor. 12:7–10):
To keep me from being too elated by the abundance of revelations, I was given a splinter in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, to harass me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I besought the Lord about this, that it should leave me; but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities; for when I am weak, then I am strong.
The sequel to Paul’s mystical experience was a distressing, indeed humiliating, physical ailment which he feared at first might be a handicap to his effective ministry but which in fact, by giving his self-esteem a knock-out blow and keeping him constantly dependent on the divine enabling, proved to be a help, not a handicap. Many guesses have been made about the identity of this “splinter in the flesh”; their very variety proves the impossibility of a certain diagnosis. One favourite guess has been epilepsy—a guess which, if substantiated, would put Paul into the company of such men of action as Julius Caesar and Napoleon—but it is no more than a guess.3 Whatever it was, it was probably the “bodily ailment” from which he suffered when he first visited the Galatians—an ailment which was a “trial” to them as well as to him and which might have been expected to repel them or make them spit in aversion, whereas on the contrary they welcomed him “as an angel of God” (Galatians 4:13 f.). His thrice-repeated prayer for the removal of the ailment was answered, not by his deliverance from it, but by his receiving the necessary grace to bear it—not simply to live with it but to be thankful for it. If his ministry was so effective despite this physical weakness, then the transcendent power was manifestly God’s, not his own.4 Infirmities like this were welcomed, together with the other hardships which were part of the apostolic lot, if they were the condition on which the power of the risen Christ operated through him. They constantly reminded him not so much of his own inadequacy as of the total adequacy of Christ, in whom, when he was personally most weak, he knew himself to be most strong.
2. Paul’s “mysticism”
Such a record as this very naturally raises the question whether or not Paul can be described as a mystic. That he can be so described has been believed and affirmed by some students of the man and his writings whose names carry exceptional weight in the theological world. We have only to think of such titles as Albert Schweitzer’s The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle5 or Johannes Schneider’s Die Passionsmystik des Paulus6—the wording of the latter title being borrowed from Adolf Deissmann, who used it of Paul’s interpretation of Christian existence in terms of dying and rising with Christ. For Deissmann, Mystik (“mysticism”) was a term applicable “to every religious tendency that discovers the way to God through inner experience without the mediation of reasoning”.7
A more positive definition was offered by Evelyn Underhill, for whom mysticism was “the name of that organic process which involves the perfect consummation of the Love of God: the achievement here and now of the immortal heritage of men”.8 This definition may cover Paul’s religious experience, if we bear in mind that for him the love of God was mediated and indeed embodied “in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:39).9
According to Albert Schweitzer, Paul’s mysticism is unique because, in spite of its high intellectual level, it does not take the form of direct union with God but rather of union with Christ. “In Paul”, he says, “there is no God-mysticism; only a Christ-mysticism by means of which man comes into relation to God.… This ‘being-in-Christ’ is the prime enigma of the Pauline teaching: once grasped it gives the clue to the whole”.10
When Schweitzer says that there is no “God-mysticism” in Paul, he concludes that Paul could not have used with approval the quotation from Epimenides which in Acts 17:28 he is said to have recited in his speech before the Athenian Areopagus: “In him we live and move and have our being”.11 On this two things should be said. First, the so-called mysticism of the Pauline epistles belongs to the new creation, the order of redemption; in the Areopagitica it is man’s relation to God in the order of the old creation that is in view. Second, whatever was the force of the preposition “in” intended by Epimenides, Luke represents Paul as quoting his words to prove that God is the creator of all men and that they accordingly are his offspring. This is not really a form of “God-mysticism” and in any case does not conflict with Paul’s statement that in the order of redemption, or, as he puts it, “in Christ Jesus”, believers are “all sons of God through faith” (Galatians 3:26). Moreover, the locution “in God” is not foreign to the Pauline vocabulary: we recall the twofold mention of “the church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thessalonians 1:1; 2 Thessalonians 1:1) and the reference in Ephesians 3:9 to “the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things”—although this last reference cannot be understood in terms of “God-mysticism”; it means something like “in the mind (or purpose) of God”.12
But such phrases as “in Christ Jesus” (quoted above) or “in Christ” or “in the Lord” are characteristic of Paul, and it is the concept which they express that is often in view (as with Schweitzer) when people speak of “Pauline mysticism”.
If these expressions have a mystical significance, then they signify a communal or corporate mysticism. There is little enough in Paul’s writings that savours of “the flight of the alone to the Alone”.13 Even when he introduces the strange personal experience described in 2 Corinthians 12:2–10 by saying that it happened to “a man in Christ”, he uses a phrase which is applicable to all other Christians and binds him together with them.
The corporate significance of “in Christ” and similar phrases is brought out well by the New English Bible, which occasionally uses such terms as “incorporate” and “concorporate” to express it. In other words, “in Christ” and similar expressions convey the same thought as Paul elsewhere conveys by speaking of Christians as fellow-members of the body of Christ—a mode of thought which he develops along fresh and influential lines of his own—although one may be doubtful about the propriety of describing it in terms of the “mystical” body of Christ.
The body of Christ (the believing community as a whole), together with its members one by one, is vitalized by the life of the risen Christ and energized by his Spirit. Incorporation into this body is effected by personal faith in Christ, sacramentally sealed in baptism and sustained by the eucharist.14 For Paul, baptism symbolizes the believer’s dying and rising with Christ: “the man we once were” (Romans 6:6) has died in his death and the “new man”, bearing the Christ-likeness, has come alive in his resurrection. The external washing in water has an inward and spiritual counterpart: “in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body, whether we were Jews or Greeks, slaves or freemen; and we were all watered with one Spirit” (1 Corinthians 12:13).15
It is plain, however, that for Paul dying and rising with Christ was not only a matter of sacramental theology or church doctrine but of personal experience. He thought of his entry into Christian life in these terms: “I have been crucified with Christ”, he writes to the Galatian churches, and adds: “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself up for me” (Galatians 2:20). This personal appropriation of the love manifested to mankind in the self-sacrifice of Christ was as real as his awareness of personal faith-union with Christ and of that faith-union as the source of his Christian life. With even greater intensity he describes himself in his apostolic service as “always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. For [he adds] while we live we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh” (2 Corinthians 4:10 f.).
3. Sharing the messianic sufferings
When Paul thought of himself in particular as “a man in Christ”, a member of his body, it was more often than not to take seriously his special responsibility towards fellow-members of the same body. The sufferings of the Messiah (a feature of rabbinical expectation) were, in Paul’s view, the sufferings to be borne by the Messiah. Jesus accordingly had suffered on earth, enduring death by crucifixion to procure his people’s liberation from spiritual bondage. In his present exaltation he was, naturally, immune from such sufferings as he had endured on earth; yet (as Paul had learned on the Damascus road)16 he still counted as his own the sufferings endured by his people for his sake. According to Luke’s record, the risen Lord said of the newly-converted Paul, “I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name” (Acts 9:16), and Paul’s own account confirms the magnitude and variety of hardships which he experienced in the course of his apostolic ministry. He did not resent these things; “we rejoice in our sufferings”, he said (Romans 5:3), not only because of their character–building power but also because he was thus able to realize his ambition of sharing Christ’s sufferings, “becoming like him in his death, that if possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead” (Philippians 3:11).
Nor was his motive in gladly accepting this share in the sufferings of Christ purely self-regarding. He seems to have held that the more of these sufferings he personally absorbed, the less would remain for his fellow-Christians to endure. “I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake”, he writes to the Colossians, “and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church” (Colossians 1:24).17 To the same effect he tells his friends in Corinth that “if we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation” (2 Corinthians 1:6). As Jesus had offered up to God as an atonement “for many” the injuries inflicted on him, so Paul accepted his injuries and trials the more readily in the hope that thus his converts and other fellow-believers would be spared the like. “So, then”, he says, “death is at work in us [that is, ‘in me’], but life in you” (2 Corinthians 4:12).
4. Life in the Spirit
The bestowal of the Spirit of God, or the Holy Spirit, in the New Testament is primarily an eschatological phenomenon in the sense that it is presented as the fulfilment of Old Testament promises associating this bestowal with the age of renewal. Ezekiel, for example, during the exile, declares that when God restores his people’s fortunes, he will give them a new spirit, his own spirit, so that, cleansed from their moral and religious defilement, they may thenceforth do his will from the heart (Ezekiel 11:16–20; 36:24–27). A post-exilic oracle announces that in the days of restoration God will pour out his spirit on “all flesh” (Joel 2:28 f.). The context suggests that “all flesh” refers in the first instance to Israel, although its ultimate range may be wider. The context further indicates that the chief effect of this outpouring of Yahweh’s spirit will be an unprecedented exercise of the gift of prophecy, even by slaves and slave-girls, not to mention freemen and freewomen.
Not long before the dawn of the Christian era, we find this expectation taken up in the Qumran community. Part of the community’s preparation for the new age was its provision of a “foundation” for the spirit of holiness (or holy spirit). The community is pictured as a living temple, in which the lay members constitute the outer compartment, the holy place, while the priestly members constitute the inner shrine, the holy of holies. This living temple seems to be envisaged as a dwelling-place for the spirit of holiness, where the offering of obedient lives and praising lips is an acceptable substitute for the animal sacrifices of the old order.18
Not only so, but in the community the spirit of holiness is the fount of knowledge. The spirit that formerly spoke through the prophets, God’s “anointed ones” by whom he taught his people,19 is now available to dwell not only within the community as a whole but also within individual members, making known to them, and especially to their leaders, the interpretation of the prophets words and the way in which God’s hidden purpose was about to be accomplished at the impending end-time. “I, as instructor”, runs one of the Hymns of Thanksgiving, “have come to know thee, O God, by the spirit which thou hast placed within me, and by thy holy spirit I have listened faithfully to thy wonderful secret counsel.”20
In the gospel narrative Jesus receives the Holy Spirit at his baptism21 as the necessary endowment for his messianic ministry which involved baptizing others with the same Spirit.22 There are hints in the Synoptic tradition that Jesus knew that he was operating under limitations during his Palestinian ministry,23 and these become more explicit in the upper-room discourses of the Fourth Gospel, where Jesus’ departure means the coming of the Spirit and the empowering of his followers to accomplish greater works then he himself had done.24 We are thus prepared for something like Luke’s account of the descent of the Spirit at the first Christian Pentecost, accompanied by the signs of the new age on a greater scale than had been seen during Jesus’ ministry.25
This general understanding of the presence and power of the Spirit is presupposed in Paul. For him, the Spirit has come: his indwelling presence is experienced by the people of Christ both corporately and individually: the church and the individual believer may equally be spoken of as a temple of the Holy Spirit.26 And this concept is no mere theologoumenon; it is something which is experienced intensely and makes an immense difference to present existence. The Spirit pours the love of God into the hearts of believers27 and brings them increasingly into conformity with the character of Christ. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is”, says Paul, “there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit” (2 Corinthians 3:17b, 18). What this “image” amounts to in practical experience is spelt out in the ninefold “fruit of the Spirit” in Galatians 5:22 f.—“love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control”. These were the qualities which marked the historical Jesus, and Paul desires to see them reproduced in his converts—and, of course, in himself. Some of those qualities, he knew, did not come to him naturally. He was too fond of portraying the Christian life as a strenuous exercise—a race to be run, a battle to be fought (especially against himself)28—for us to suppose that victory came to him “sudden, in a minute”.29
The tension could not be completely resolved so long as he lived at once in the present age (temporally) and in the age to come (spiritually)—that is, so long as he lived on earth in mortal body. But he found the secret of victory in the liberating “law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:2). The central principle of this “law of the Spirit” is the love of God in Christ—first descending vertically and implanted in the heart by the Spirit and then flowing out into the lives of others. The canticle of love in 1 Corinthians 13 is an eloquent celebration of this truth.
5. Fellowship and “mysteries”
Despite what has been said about “corporate mysticism” in Paul’s thought, it is probably true that the mystic, as commonly conceived, tends to be self-sufficient in his religious life, or at least can well be self-sufficient when circumstances require. He may be gregarious and friendly; he may attach high importance to life in society, but he does not depend on it for his religious sustenance. Paul insisted on the common life in the body of Christ, in which the members were interrelated and interdependent, each making a personal contribution to the good of the others and of the whole;30 yet, when necessity so dictated, he could maintain his spiritual existence apart from external aids, human or material. “I have learned the secret of being content (autarkēs)”, he says, “in whatever state of life I am” (Philippians 4:11). Yet this autarkeia is not Stoic self-sufficiency: it is so complete a dependence on the Christ who lives within him that all else is, by comparison, expendable: “I can do all things”, he adds, “in him who strengthens me” (Philippians 4:13). At the same time he makes it plain that the well-being of his friends meant much for his personal sense of well-being: it is life itself for him to know that his Thessalonian converts “stand fast in the Lord” (1 Thessalonians 3:8); “you are in my heart”, he tells the Corinthian Christians, “to die together and to live together” (2 Corinthians 7:3). He looked forward with special joy to the day of Christ because he hoped then to present his converts to the Lord who commissioned him as the visible evidence of his discharge of his trust: “For what is our hope or joy or crown of exultation before our Lord Jesus at his parousia? Is it not you?” (1 Thessalonians 2:19).31
Phenomena such as glossolalia, to which Paul makes special reference in one of his letters, are not necessarily bound up with mysticism: the one may exist without the other. When Paul says that the person speaking with tongues “utters mysteries in the spirit”, he does not mean that he is communicating special revelations: in fact, he is not communicating anything, “for no one understands him” (1 Corinthians 14:2). This last clause, indeed, is another way of saying that he “utters mysteries”. Paul himself can practise glossolalia, but we should never have guessed it had he not, in dealing with this and similar phenomena in Corinth, divulged the fact; and he divulges it in order to play it down.32 Clearly he regarded it as an exercise of little value or importance. To his way of thinking, it is the source and content of an utterance that are important, not the bare fact of its being an “inspired” utterance. He knew that the phenomenon could be paralleled in paganism: hence it was necessary to understand what was being uttered.33
When he himself, on the other hand, imparts “mysteries”—new revelations—he does so in intelligible language. How he received those mysteries is not so clear. It was not by simple reflection on the problems of Christian faith and life: when he gives the results of such reflection he does not claim to be imparting a mystery. Thus he can say, when introducing new teaching about the coming resurrection, “Lo! I tell you a mystery” (1 Corinthians 15:51)—the “mystery” or revelation being that at the resurrection not only will the dead be raised immortal but the living will exchange perishable for imperishable bodies to cope with the environment of a new order. But when he goes on to think of the state of the individual (of himself, more particularly) between death and resurrection, he expresses his own conviction—“we know” (2 Corinthians 5:1, 6)—arising from a confrontation with what had seemed to be certain and imminent death, but he has no revelation, no “mystery”, to impart.34
His “mysteries”, which he treats as direct communications from the risen Lord through the Spirit, may have been given to him in the course of visionary or ecstatic experiences; but we cannot be sure, since he does not tell us. In the one experience of this kind which he does relate in some detail, the words which he heard were, as we have seen, incommunicable. The “mysteries” which he was granted were not private experiences for his own spiritual enrichment; they were revelations of the divine purpose and its fulfilment to be imparted for the upbuilding and healthy functioning of the whole Christian fellowship.
6. The evidence of Acts
If we turn from Paul’s letters to the evidence of Acts, it confirms in general the impression made by the letters. “Visions and revelations of the Lord” (to quote Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 12:1) are not lacking in Luke’s account of Paul’s career. In his letters Paul refers repeatedly to his conversion experience, the central feature of which was the appearing of the risen Lord, but he gives a minimum of narrative detail. The narrative of Acts gives three fuller and more graphic accounts of his experience,35 differing in some details but essentially in agreement, which certainly mention the fact of Paul’s seeing the risen Lord but lay chief stress on the call which he received to be his witness and herald.
Attempts have been made to explain the physiological features of the conversion story in Acts, but they are even less successful than attempts so to explain his ecstatic rapture to the third heaven and the ensuing “splinter in the flesh”. If Luke’s threefold account of the event can be accommodated within our definition of mysticism, then Paul’s conversion might be called a mystical experience, provided that such a description does not call into question the objective reality of the vision which he saw and the voice which he heard.
When Paul revisited Jerusalem after his conversion, his call to evangelize the Gentiles was reaffirmed in another vision of the risen Lord. “I was praying in the temple,” he says (Acts 22:17 ff.), “and fell into a trance, in which I saw him saying to me, ‘Make haste, get out of Jerusalem without delay, because they will not accept your testimony about me.’ ‘Lord’, said I, ‘they know that I was the one who, in synagogue after synagogue, used to imprison and flog those who believed on you. They know that when your witness Stephen shed his blood I stood by approving and guarded his executioners’ clothes.’36 ‘Begone’, said he, ‘I will send you far away to the Gentiles’.”37 Again, the kind of experience here described by the Paul of Acts is by no means out of keeping with the impression gained from his letters. Both seeing and hearing are implied, as they are in the incident at a critical juncture in his ministry at Corinth, when “the Lord said to Paul in a vision by night: ‘Do not be afraid: speak and let no one silence you. I am with you: no one will harm you by any attack. I have a multitude of people in this city’ ” (Acts 18:9 f.).
Similarly, when he was placed in protective custody during his last and most perilous visit to Jerusalem, “the Lord stood by him and said, ‘Take courage; as you have borne witness to me in Jerusalem, you must bear witness in Rome also’ ” (Acts 23:11). It was not the Lord himself, but (as Paul puts it) “the messenger of the God to whom I belong and whom I serve” that stood by him during the last night of his adventurous voyage from Asia to Malta and said, “Have no fear, Paul. You must stand before Caesar, and see, God has spared for your sake the lives of all your ship’s company” (Acts 27:23 f.).
The perspective of Acts does not expose as some of Paul’s letters do the deeper inner springs of his spiritual life, but provides some hint of them from the viewpoint of an associate and admirer whose own pattern of religious experience may have been different from Paul’s—the “once-born” pattern, perhaps, as against the “twice-born” pattern, in the special sense in which those terms were used by F. W. Newman and William James.38 Yet Luke’s perspective is not inconsistent with the self-portrait in Paul’s own writings.
7. Vision and apostleship
Paul’s Christian life, then, began with an experience in which the risen Lord appeared to him and spoke to him, and its subsequent course was marked by further experiences of a similar kind, attested both by himself and by Luke.
While to others the “visionary” inception of Paul’s Christian career might throw doubt on the validity of his claim to be an apostle, to Paul it was the basis of that claim. There was no difference in his eyes, apart from the lapse of time, between the risen Lord’s appearance to him and his earlier appearances to the original apostles. He could and did appeal to the remarkable achievement of his Gentile mission, to the record of what Christ had accomplished through him, as confirmation of his apostolic claim,39 but that was an ad hominem argument: in his own consciousness it was the personal call of the risen Christ that made him an apostle.40 We may wonder if he would have begun to entertain doubts on this point if his missionary endeavours had been unsuccessful, but that is a hypothetical question. Paul, it seems, never had occasion to suspect that he might have been “seduced”, as Jeremiah did when his message proved so consistently unacceptable to his people, although Paul’s call is recorded in terms reminiscent of Jeremiah’s call to his prophetic ministry.41 When Paul says that God had set him apart for his life’s work, to preach Christ among the nations, “before I was born” (Galatians 1:15)—he echoes, as we have seen, the inaugural oracle to Jeremiah. And when his apostolic credentials were challenged, he might well have said, as Jeremiah said in a similar situation, “in truth the Lord sent me … to speak all these words” (Jeremiah 26:15).
Even more impressive is the parallel with the language of Isaiah 49:1–6, where the Servant of Yahweh summons the coastlands and distant peoples to hear him as he proclaims:
Yahweh called me from the womb,
from the body of my mother he named my name …
And now says Yahweh,
who formed me from the womb to be his servant …
“It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
to raise up the tribes of Jacob
and to restore the preserved of Israel;
I will give you as a light to the nations
that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”
It is not by chance that in Acts 13:47 Paul and Barnabas, in the synagogue of Pisidian Antioch, quote this last couplet as their authority for turning to the Gentiles with the gospel.42 As for Paul, others might undertake that part of the Servant’s vocation which had to do with Israel; he knew himself called to fulfil that part of it which involved the carrying of God’s saving light among the Gentiles, near and far.
It was with the assurance of his divine commission, then, that Paul embarked upon his programme and carried it out stage by stage to Central Asia Minor, to the Aegean world, to Illyricum and then on to Rome and (in intention at least) to Spain. Many others were engaged in Gentile evangelization, but none with the overall strategic planning conceived in Paul’s mind and so largely executed by his dynamic energy. This energy was the fruit of his conviction that he was a figure of eschatological significance, a key agent in the progress of salvation history, a chosen instrument in the Lord’s hands to bring Gentiles into the obedience of faith as a necessary preparation for the ultimate salvation of all Israel and the consummation of God’s redeeming purpose for the world. If this conviction, and the experience which gave birth to it, can be called mysticism, then it is mysticism of a very exceptional order.
Perhaps R. C. Tannehill has the answer. Defining mysticism as “the doctrine that the individual can come into immediate contact with God through subjective experiences which differ essentially from the experiences of daily life”, he adds: “By this definition Paul may be spoken of as, among other things, a ‘mystic’ (cf. his visions, 2 Cor. 12:1–4), but he does not have a mystical theology.”43 This last point is well taken: Paul’s theology was not based on experiences which might be described as mystical: it is based on Jesus, the fulfiller of God’s promise and purpose of salvation; Jesus, the crucified and exalted Lord; Jesus, the divine wisdom, in whom God creates, maintains and brings to consummation everything that exists; Jesus, who here and now lives within his people by his Spirit. To the exposition of this theology not only prophetic scripture but also rabbinical exegesis and primitive Christian tradition make their contributions, but the whole is fused into a new compound in the alembic of Paul’s passionate embracing of “the allsurpassing knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord” (Philippians 3:8). And this knowledge did not encourage contemplative quietism; it constituted an insistent call to lifelong action.