CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 38
Concluding Reflections
1. Paul’s personality
What kind of man was paul?
So far as external features are concerned, we gather only that, in the estimation of candid friends, he was impressive neither in appearance nor in speech.1 We have already discussed the humiliating disability which may have had an adverse effect on one or both of these.2 More important, however, are his qualities of mind and spirit.
By his own account, he grew up a zealot for the ancestral traditions of his people;3 and when those traditions were displaced in his life by another cause, he was no less zealous in the promotion of this new cause. The zeal which he had shown as a persecutor of the church he continued to show as a builder of what he had once tried to destroy, as a bondslave of the Lord whom he had formerly repudiated. For the sake of this Lord everything that he had once valued was discounted as so much refuse;4 the one-time rigorist made himself the most versatile and adaptable of men in order to bring others to acknowledge the same Lord as he did; everything was subordinated to the propagation of the good news of his grace and to this cause all his talents and energies were dedicated.
Something of Paul’s native impetuousness is apparent in his epistolary style. His letters were regularly dictated to an assistant. At times the torrent of his thought rushes forward so swiftly that it outstrips the flow of his words, and his words have to leap over a gap now and then so as to catch up on his thought. How the scribe managed to keep up with his words we can only surmise. Time and again Paul starts a sentence that never reaches a grammatical end, for before he is well launched on it a new thought strikes him and he turns aside to deal with that. When he comes back on to the main track, the original start of the sentence has been forgotten. All this means that Paul is not the smoothest of authors, or the easiest to follow, but it does give us an unmistakable impression of the man himself. He has something worth saying, and in saying it he communicates something of himself; there is nothing artificial or merely conventional about the way he says it. And what he has to say is so important—for readers of the twentieth century as much as for those of the first—that the effort to understand him is abundantly rewarding.
Dr. Samuel Johnson described one of his acquaintances as an “unclubbable” man.5 That is the last adjective that anyone who knew Paul would use of him. He was eminently “clubbable”, sociable, gregarious. He delighted in the company of his fellows, both men and women. The most incredible feature in the Paul of popular mythology is his alleged misogyny. He treated women as persons: we recall his commendation of Phoebe, the deacon of the church in Cenchreae, who had shown herself a helper to him as to many others,6 or his appreciation of Euodia and Syntyche of Philippi who worked side by side with him in the gospel.7 The mainstream churches of Christendom, as they inch along towards a worthier recognition of the ministry of women, have some way to go yet before they come abreast of Paul.8
The range of his friendship and the warmth of his affection are qualities which no attentive reader of his letters can miss. There are scores of people mentioned in the New Testament who are known to us, by name at least, simply because they were friends of Paul. And in his friends he was able to call forth a devotion which knew no limits. Priscilla and Aquila risked their lives for him in a dangerous situation.9 Epaphroditus of Philippi overtaxed his strength and suffered an almost fatal illness in his anxiety to be of service to the imprisoned apostle.10 Timothy readily surrendered whatever personal ambitions he might have cherished in order to play the part of a son to Paul and help him in his missionary activity, showing a selfless concern for others that matched the apostle’s own eagerness to spend and be spent for them.11
As a pious Jew, Paul would have thought of his death as the final offering he could make to God, an offering which would expiate his sins and crown his piety. As a Christian, he continued to look upon his death as an offering to God, but preferred now that it should be credited to his converts’ account rather than to his own. For example, if some contribution was necessary to complete the faith of the Philippian Christians, a libation to be poured out upon their sacrifice, so to speak, then let the outpouring of Paul’s life be that libation. Charles Wesley in later days could voice the aspiration:
Ready for all thy perfect will,
My acts of faith and love repeat,
Till death thy endless mercies seal,
And make the sacrifice complete.
Paul was aware of the same aspiration, but with one modification: let his death make their sacrifice complete.12
Nothing can surpass the spontaneous expression of the tenderness which he feels for his Galatian friends when they are being led astray from freedom back to spiritual bondage: “my little children, for whom I suffer birth-pangs all over again until Christ be formed in you!” (Galatians 4:9). It is his affection and concern for them that explains the indignation with which he explodes against those who are misleading them, placing a yoke of slavery on their necks—the same order of indignation as earlier found expression in Jesus’ stern words about any one who upset “one of these little ones”: “Better for him that a millstone were hung round his neck and he were cast into the sea” (Luke 17:2). “Who is weak, and I am not weak?” asks Paul. “Who is tripped up, and I am not indignant?” (2 Corinthians 11:29).
Paul wants to see his converts bound together in heart by the same strong affection as he feels for them. The faith which saves, he tells the Galatians, is the “faith that works through love” (Galatians 5:6). Through this same love they are called to “serve one another” and so “fulfil the law of Christ” (Galatians 5:13; 6:2). Paul has no place for the solitary life as an ideal; for all his apostolic energy he would have scouted the suggestion that “he travels the fastest who travels alone”.13 He emphasizes the fellowship, the togetherness, of Christians in worship and action; they are members one of another, and all together members of Christ.
His converts were his pride and joy. When he writes to them he is like a father addressing his children. He commends everything that is praiseworthy in them, where others might have found little enough to commend. He scolds them for their shortcomings, and warns them that if they do not mend their ways he will take a big stick with him next time he comes.14 But he encourages them for all he is worth, and makes no secret of his consuming desire that they should grow up to be hundred-per-cent Christians, worthy of the honourable name they bear.
If he exercises a father’s privilege in this way, he boasts about them to others. When he is organizing the Jerusalem relief fund, he tells the Corinthians about the Macedonians’ generosity and boasts to the Macedonians about the Corinthians’ promptness.15 Above all, he hopes that when he gives a final account of his apostolic stewardship to the Lord who commissioned him, he will need do no more than point to his converts and have the quality of his service judged by their faith and life.16
Reference to the Jerusalem relief fund brings to mind his extraordinary sense of delicacy where money is concerned. He organized the fund, but insisted that the contributions should be handled and delivered to their destination by individuals appointed by the donors. As for himself, honesty must not only be practised but must be seen to be practised; he knew how convenient a handle involvement in financial affairs provides for suspicion-mongers. It was partly for a similar reason that he refused to accept money from the Corinthian Christians, but partly because of his inbred independence: he much preferred to maintain himself. To express thanks for a gift, even from his dear friends at Philippi, was evidently something which he could not do without a certain embarrassment.17 It is plain, too, that by maintaining himself and not becoming chargeable to others he wished to set an example to other Christians who, from a conviction that the day of the Lord was just round the corner or for some other reason, thought it was pointless to go on working to earn their daily bread.18
Paul strikes us as a man possessed of uncommon strength of will, not easily to be turned aside from the path which he believed it to be his duty to follow. Since the risen Lord had called him to be his apostle to the Gentiles, he had no option but to obey him. He obeyed him right gladly, with utter heart-devotion: the love of Christ constrained him. But even if he had felt otherwise about it, he had no option in the matter. He had been conscripted into this service. Never, to be sure, was there a more willing conscript, but he knew himself to be under authority. In other respects he might be allowed freedom of choice: not in this.19
When he argues that it is preposterous for people who have been delivered from the bondage of sin to place themselves under it again, it may be thought that he credited his converts with his own strength of will and made insufficient allowance for the pull of old habits, old associations, old environments. The bondage from which he knew himself to have been delivered was the bondage of law, and he had no desire to resume that bondage; but he had not been exposed to the Corinthian way of life and was perplexed when some of his converts found so much difficulty in shaking it off.
Yet he set no limits to the transforming power of the risen Christ, implanted in believers’ hearts by the Holy Spirit, and he saw sufficient evidence of that power in action in their lives to know that he was not recommending a hopelessly unpractical ideal. And if we suppose that he was too inclined to measure his converts by the strong-willed character of a man for whom to see that a course was right was to pursue it, let us recall his own testimony that he practised unremitting self-discipline lest, after preaching to others, he might be disqualified himself. For him the Christian life was a strenuous business: he liked to picture it in athletic terms, as a battle to be fought, a race to be run.20 Instant attainment was out of the question: not before the end of his mortal career would he have reached the goal towards which he pressed, to receive “the prize of God’s upward call in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:14). It was a naturally proud man who schooled himself to boast about his humiliations in place of his achievements.
His great concern for his converts was that they should have reproduced in their own lives the character of Christ—the fruit of the Spirit (as he called it) which included such qualities as love, patience, gentleness, meekness and self-control.21 This concern underlay much of his self-discipline. What was the use of recommending them to cultivate such qualities if they were not at the same time visible in his own life? The lack of these would certainly disqualify him from exhorting others to develop them. Some of them at least—patience and gentleness, for example—did not come to him naturally. Meekness was a distinctive feature in the character of Jesus, but its reproduction in Paul required the taming of his impetuousness by the power of the Spirit and his regular self-discipline. So resolutely, however, did he submit to this taming process that he could not only with a good conscience try to inculcate these Christian graces in others, but could even encourage them to take his own practice as their example.
As an apple-tree does not produce apples by Act of Parliament, but because it is its nature so to do, so the character of Christ cannot be produced in his people by rules and regulations; it must be the fruit of his Spirit within them. Especially in the earlier days of his ministry, Paul appears to have been bewildered by the spectacle of Christians who, instead of rejoicing in the liberty of the Spirit, preferred to be directed by a code of rules. With his own exhilarating experience of spiritual freedom, he could not be content to see his converts going along happily as those for whom “rules are more comfortable to live with than principles”.22 He longed to see them entering more fully into the liberty with which Christ had set them free instead of living like those Pharisees whom the Talmud assigns to the “tell-me-my-duty-and-I–will-do-it” category.23
But Paul’s personal strength of will was not accompanied, as it is in so many, by impatience with lesser mortals. While he himself had a robust and emancipated conscience, he had warm sympathy with those whose conscience was immature and unenlightened, and he would go to almost any length of self-denial in consideration for his weaker brethren. He deplored the inability or unwillingness of other strong-minded Christians to show them such consideration, and it was pre-eminently in this regard that he pressed his own example on them, urging them to imitate him as he for his part imitated Christ.24
His strength of will was matched by unusual physical toughness; in both respects, indeed, he might be compared to Socrates. Here the evidence of Acts corroborates that of his own writings. Luke describes how he was stoned at Lystra, dragged out of the city and left for dead by the roadside, “but as the disciples surrounded him he got up and went into the city, and set out next day with Barnabas for Derbe” (Acts 14:20). This experience forms one item in the list of hardships which he enumerates in 2 Corinthians 11:23–27. He is abashed at being put in a position where, in self-defence, he has to present such a catalogue, but the matter-of-fact recital of imprisonments, floggings, shipwrecks, narrow escapes from death and the like that he has been through in the course of his apostolic work tells its own tale of the resilience and staying power of the man who has endured it all. The scars which those experiences left he wears with pride: they were the indelible stigmata which proclaimed him to be the bondslave of the Lord in whose service he had received them.25
Paul would not have interpreted his sustaining of trouble and danger in terms of toughness; in his eyes all this was part of the life of faith, not to be endured as something one would rather be spared but to be embraced with joy as a sure token of acceptance by God and as a strengthening of Christian hope. This attitude belonged to the reversal of all conventional values implicit in the cross of Christ. Paul welcomed such hardships the more gladly as a sharing in the sufferings of Christ and as a means of absorbing in his own person afflictions which would otherwise fall to the lot of his fellow-Christians. As the hardships wore down the outer man, they were at the same time used by God for the renewal of the inner man and the augmenting of his heritage of glory.
Paul was a child of his time, born in the first century A.D. and not earlier or later, born in the Roman Empire and not beyond its frontiers, born a Jew and not a Gentile. He was influenced by his heritage, his environment and his upbringing. Some men and women remain so completely children of their time that practically everything about them can be explained in terms of their cultural conditioning. Not so Paul. Perhaps this is what John Donne had in mind when he said that “Paul, was borne a man, an Apostle, not carved out, as the rest, in time; but a fusile Apostle, an Apostle powred out, and cast in a Mold”.26 He belongs to that select company who leave their mark on their time, who mould their contemporaries and exert an influence which stretches far into the future.
Although he was rabbinically trained, his reappraisal of the whole spirit and content of his earlier training was so radical that many Jewish scholars have had difficulty in recognizing him as the product of a rabbinical education. They have found it easier to appreciate the Prophet of Nazareth (who, indeed, was not rabbinically trained) than the apostle to the Gentiles. Paul presents an enigma with which they cannot readily come to terms.27
When it dawned on the young Pharisee that God in the fulness of time had sent his Son, that the crucified Jesus was exalted as Lord over all, that as such he had inaugurated a new era which superseded the reign of law, it not only brought about a complete reorientation in his own thought and life, but through him reoriented the thought and life of a considerable body of mankind. While others in his day took part in the Gentile mission, his contribution was unique and most far-reaching. Paul, more (it appears) than any of the original disciples of Jesus, appreciated the universal implications of his Master’s person and work and gave them practical effect. Four themes emphasized in his teaching call for summary mention because they still need to be emphasized.
(a) True religion is not a matter of rules and regulations. God does not deal with people like an accountant, but accepts them freely when they respond to his love, and implants the Spirit of Christ in their hearts so that they may show to others the love they have received from him.
(b) In Christ men and women have come of age, as the new humanity brought into being through his death and resurrection-life. God does not keep his children in leading-strings but calls them to live as his responsible adult sons and daughters.
(c) People matter more than things, more than principles, more than causes. The highest of principles and the best of causes exist for the sake of people; to sacrifice people to them is a perversion of the true order.
(d) Unfair discrimination on the grounds of race, religion, class or sex is an offence against God and humanity alike.
If these lessons are important, it is well to give grateful credit to one man who taught them.
2. Paul in the early church
Paul’s withdrawal from public activity during the four years following his arrest by Roman auxiliaries in Jerusalem gave his opponents throughout his Gentile mission-field an opportunity which they were not slow to exploit. The evidence of Colossians, if it is to be dated in the context of his Roman imprisonment, speaks for itself; and the Philippian Christians are put on their guard alike against Judaizers (the “mutilation” party) and gnosticizing libertines (Philippians 3:2, 18 f.). The words of 2 Timothy 1:15, “You are well aware that all who are in Asia turned away from me”, probably relate to the climax of this anti-Pauline trend. What the direction of the “turning away” was we are not told: Phygelus and Hermogenes are singled out for special mention, presumably as leaders of the movement, but no details of their teaching are given. Elsewhere in the same letter another couple, Hymenaeus and Philetus, are accused of deviating from the truth by maintaining an over-realized eschatology—saying, as some of the Corinthians had said before them, that the resurrection had already taken place (2 Timothy 2:17 f.).28 It is not even certain that Hymenaeus and Philetus belonged to the province of Asia; the probability that they did so is high, however, if (as seems likely) Hymenaeus is identical with the bearer of that name who, according to 1 Timothy 1:19 f., had with a certain Alexander “made shipwreck of the faith” and undergone disciplinary action at Paul’s hands (by remote control, presumably), “so as to learn not to blaspheme”.29
A stabilizing influence was apparently introduced into the churches of Asia in the later sixties with the emigration to that province of some forward-looking and liberal-minded Christian leaders from Judaea, including “John, the disciple of the Lord” (as he is called) and Philip of Caesarea with his prophesying daughters. They enjoyed considerable prestige among the Asian Christians, not only while they lived but for some generations after.30 The presence of such men and women, closely associated as they were with Christian beginnings in Palestine, helped to discourage tendencies to Jewish legalism or libertine gnosticism.
But the one event that more than anything else brought about the collapse of the judaizing mission in Paul’s mission-field was the Jewish revolt against Rome in A.D. 66, which led not only to the destruction of the temple and city of Jerusalem four years later but also to the dispersal of the church of Jerusalem. The church of Jerusalem endeavoured to maintain its identity in exile for many generations, but no longer could it issue decrees to be accepted by Gentile Christendom; indeed, contact between it and the Gentile churches was reduced to a minimum. Its ancient prestige was later inherited to some extent by the new church of Jerusalem, the completely Gentile community which established itself in Hadrian’s new foundation of Aelia Capitolina, erected on the site of the holy city in A.D. 135 and the following years.
Where the traditions of the original church of Jerusalem were cherished, Paul remained a dubious character, if he was not indeed regarded as the enemy who sowed the tares of antinomianism among the wheat of the new law promulgated by Jesus, the prophet like Moses.31 But such a picture of Paul was eccentric and uninfluential. Throughout his Gentile mission-field, and beyond it, his prestige rose higher than it had often done in his lifetime: churches which owed their first beginnings to his evangelistic energy were proud to acknowledge him as their apostolic founder.
Rome: Tre Fontane: Church of St. Paul, interior (see p. 450)
Page of p46 (see p. 466), showing Galatians 6:10–18 and Philippians 1:1. p46 is the oldest known manuscript of paul’s letters (c. A.D. 200); it is one of the Chester Beatty biblical papyri in the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin
His letters, whether as entire documents or in fragments, were carefully collected. He himself had given a first impetus to this trend in his life-time by encouraging the exchange of letters addressed by him to neighbouring churches and probably by occasionally sending copies of a letter addressed to one community to be read elsewhere. When Clement of Rome wrote in the name of the Roman church to the church of Corinth about A.D. 96, he plainly had access to a copy of the letter which we know as 1 Corinthians, for he quotes it freely, reminding the Corinthian Christians that they should have paid more attention to what their apostolic founder had said to them forty years before.
It may well be that a powerful impetus was given to the collecting of Paul’s letters and their publication as a literary corpus by the wider circulation of the second volume of Luke’s history—the Acts of the Apostles. If there was any tendency to forget Paul in the regions which he had evangelized, this fascinating record would certainly rekindle interest in him both in those regions and elsewhere.32
However that may be, early in the second century an unknown benefactor of all succeeding ages copied at least ten Pauline letters into a codex from which copies were made for use in many parts of the Christian world.33 From that time forth Paul’s letters circulated as a collection and not singly. The second-century writers, whether “orthodox” or “heterodox”, who refer to the Pauline letters, knew them in the form of a corpus.
Among the “heterodox” writers the most notable was Marcion, who about A.D. 144 promulgated a canon of Christian scripture, comprising his edition of the Gospel of Luke and ten Pauline epistles (the Pastorals being omitted). Paul, in Marcion’s eyes, was the only faithful apostle of Jesus Christ; the original apostles all adulterated his pure gospel with judaizing doctrines. But even the authentic Pauline letters required to be purified of what, according to Marcion, were non-Pauline accretions, such as those passages which assumed the continuing validity of the Old Testament writings. It has been said that Marcion was “the only man of his age who understood Paul, and even in his understanding of him he misunderstood him”.34 Although his peculiar teachings were repudiated by the church, his edition of the Pauline corpus influenced the subsequent transmission of their text in several ways.35
Our oldest known surviving copy of the Pauline letters is a papyrus codex in the Chester Beatty collection in Dublin (P46 in the recognized list of Greek New Testament manuscripts). It belongs to the end of the second century and contains the shorter Pauline corpus of ten letters (excluding the Pastorals) together with the Epistle to the Hebrews. In Egypt, from, which the Chester Beatty biblical papyri came, Hebrews was regarded as a Pauline letter as early as A.D. 18036 (the Roman church, to one group in which Hebrews was probably sent in the first instance, knew better).
Throughout catholic Christendom, then, by the last quarter of the second century, Paul’s memory was venerated and his writings were canonized.37 But this did not mean that his teaching was understood. The tendency to subject Christian life to regulations was too powerful, and when, as happened from time to time, someone appeared who really grasped Paul’s intention, the effect was liable to be revolutionary. Many of the fathers would not have thought it possible that Paul really meant what he said about Christians being no longer under law but under grace.38 Naturally, too, when the historical context of his more polemical passages had been forgotten it was difficult to follow his strategy as he waged war on two fronts simultaneously, going as far as he could, first with this line of thought among his converts and then with that, until he reached the point where the interposition of a “But …” substantially modified what had appeared to be a wholesale concession. One ironical result of this failure to place Paul’s arguments in their contemporary setting was that the apostle who had been criticized by moralists in his lifetime as an antinomian was highly esteemed by their spiritual successors as an ascetic.39
3. Paul in fiction and legend
Early in the second half of the second century A.D. a presbyter in the province of Asia gathered together legends and traditions about Paul from the whole area of the apostle’s activity from Damascus to Rome, drew on his own imagination to provide them with the necessary continuity, and issued the work as the Acts of Paul. His purpose was to honour the apostle’s memory, but his colleagues and superiors disapproved of what he had done—finding fault either with the general idea of such a work of fiction, or with some of its contents which encouraged beliefs or practices which they found unacceptable—and deposed him from his office. He affirmed that he had compiled the work amore Pauli, “for love of Paul”, but the worthiness of the motive could not compensate, to their way of thinking, for the objectionable nature of the product.
Our information about the author’s unfrocking comes from Tertullian of Carthage who, writing later in the same century, warns those who allow a teaching ministry for women in the church that they should not invoke the authority of this work, since it was condemned by competent authority.40 The particular section of the work referred to is the episode of Paul and Thekla. Thekla was a legendary convert of the apostle’s who, at his instance, broke off her engagement and for a time shared his apostolic ministry, experiencing a miraculous deliverance from martyrdom. The Paul of this episode acts inconsistently with the Paul of the Pastoral Epistles: whereas the Pastoral Epistles “permit no woman to teach” and condemn those “who forbid marriage” (1 Timothy 2:12; 4:3), Paul in these Acts discourages Thekla from matrimony but encourages her to cultivate her gift as a teacher. It may have been in the inculcation of celibacy and general asceticism that the Asian church leaders recognized heretical tendencies in the Acts of Paul, for such tendencies were manifesting themselves just then in the new Montanist movement.41
It is in this section of the Acts of Paul that we come upon a pen-portrait of the apostle which has sometimes been thought, because of its vigorous and unconventional character, to reflect a persistent local recollection. Paul is on his way to Iconium with two companions—
And a man named Onesiphorus, who had heard that Paul had come to Iconium, went out with his children Simmias and Zeno and his wife Lectra to meet Paul, that he might receive him to his house. Titus had told him what Paul looked like: thus far Onesiphorus had not seen him in the flesh, but only in the spirit. He went along the royal road that leads to Lystra,42 and stood there waiting for him, and looked at those who came, comparing them with Titus’s description. And he saw Paul coming, a man small of stature, with a bald head and crooked legs, in a good state of body, with eyebrows meeting and nose somewhat hooked, full of friendliness; for now he appeared like a man, and now he had the face of an angel.43
Despite the impression of realism which this pen-portrait makes, it has been suggested that it belongs to a literary tradition—the tradition of which Alcibiades’s description of Socrates is an early expression. Alcibiades’s description is to a large extent quite unflattering—Socrates is portrayed as a Silenus or a satyr in outward appearance—but his conversation is inexpressibly captivating: within the unprepossessing exterior there was a treasure “so divine and golden, so wholly beautiful and wonderful, that I simply had to do as Socrates bade me”.44 Robert Eisler argued that the description of Paul belonged to the same genre as the imaginative description of Jesus in the so-called Letter of Lentulus.45 But these parallels are not so close as to carry conviction, and the possibility remains—it can be no more than that—that Sir William Ramsay was not mistaken in saying that “this plain and unflattering account of the Apostle’s personal appearance seems to embody a very early tradition”.46
While Tertullian disapproved of the Acts of Paul, his contemporary Hippolytus of Rome seems to have accepted the work—not indeed as holy writ (it was never intended to receive such recognition) but as a genuine record of events. Hippolytus was the greatest scholar of his day in western Christendom but his scholarship did not prevent him from taking, apparently, as factual truth what we should regard as one of the most patently legendary incidents in the book—the story of Paul’s confrontation in the arena with a lion which he had befriended and baptized.47
The legend of Androcles and the lion is well enough known today, thanks mainly to Bernard Shaw, but in the mid-second century something very like it was told of Paul himself. This probably arose from a literalistic interpretation of Paul’s reference to his having “fought with beasts at Ephesus” (1 Corinthians 15:32) or of his later claim to have been “rescued from the lion’s mouth” (2 Timothy 4:17). The story was recorded quite circumstantially in the Acts of Paul and Hippolytus, treating it quite seriously, adduces it in his Commentary on Daniel as a parallel to the story of Daniel in the lions’ den: “If we believe that, when Paul was condemned to the circus, the lion which was set upon him lay down at his feet and licked him, why should we not also believe what happened in the case of Daniel?”48—a precarious apologetic indeed!
In Rome, too, legend embellished the story of Paul. It was told, for example, how he was taken to Naples to see the tomb of the poet Virgil, who died in 19 B.C., and wept over him: “What a convert I would have made of you”, said he, “had I found you still alive, greatest of poets!”49 The record of his martyrdom in particular was adorned with miraculous accessories. As he was led to the place of execution, says one apocryphal work, he saw a woman named Perpetua, blind in one eye, who burst into tears as he passed. He asked her to lend him her kerchief. The soldiers who were conducting him laughed at her, but she adjured them by the emperor’s well-being to tie it round Paul’s eyes and return it to her after his death. When they did so, she put it on again, all bloodstained as it now was, and immediately the sight of her blind eye was restored.50
Reliefs in the church of St. Paul at Tre Fontane commemorate the legend that the apostle’s head bounced on the ground three times when it was severed, and at each place there welled forth one of the three springs from which the place is named.
4. Paul’s perennial influence
Such legends represent an unsophisticated attempt to emphasize the greatness of Paul. But his true greatness is attested by the abiding power of his liberating message. Time and again, when the gospel has been in danger of being fettered and disabled in the bonds of legalism or outworn tradition, it has been the words of Paul that have broken the bonds and set the gospel free to exert its emancipating power once more in the life of mankind.
(a) Augustine. In the summer of A.D. 386 the thirty-two year old Augustine sat weeping in the garden of his friend Alypius at Milan. He had been for two years Professor of Rhetoric in that city, and had every reason to be satisfied with his professional career thus far, yet he was conscious of a deep inner dissatisfaction. He was almost persuaded to begin a new life, but lacked the resolution to break with the old. As he sat, he heard a child singing in a neighbouring house, Tolle, lege! Tolle, lege! (“Take up and read! Take up and read!”). Taking up the scroll which lay at his friend’s side—a copy of Paul’s letters, as it happened—he let his eye fall on what we know as the closing words of Romans 13: “not in revelling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarrelling and jealousy; but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.” “No further would I read,” he says, “nor had I any need; instantly, at the end of this sentence, a clear light flooded my heart and all the darkness of doubt vanished away.”51
The colossal influence which Augustine, “the greatest Christian since New Testament times”52 (as one patristic scholar has called him), has exercised on the thought of succeeding ages can be traced directly to the light which flooded into his mind as he read the words of Paul.
(b) Luther and the Reformation. In 1513 Martin Luther, Augustinian monk and Professor of Sacred Theology in the University of Wittenberg in Saxony, endeavoured to prepare a course of lectures on the Psalms while his mind was preoccupied with the agonizing endeavour to “find a gracious God”. He was struck by the prayer of Psalm 31:1, “in thy righteousness deliver me”. But how could God’s righteousness deliver him? The righteousness of God was surely calculated rather to condemn the sinner than to save him. As he thought about the meaning of the words, his attention was more and more directed to Paul’s statement in Romans 1:17 that in the gospel “the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, ‘He who through faith is righteous shall live’ ” (Habakkuk 2:4). The result of his study is best told in his own words:
I had greatly longed to understand Paul’s epistle to the Romans, and nothing stood in the way but that one expression, “the righteousness of God”, because I took it to mean that righteousness whereby God is righteous and acts righteously in punishing the unrighteous.… Night and day I pondered until … I grasped the truth that the righteousness of God is that righteousness whereby, through grace and sheer mercy, he justifies us by faith. Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise. The whole of Scripture took on a new meaning, and whereas before “the righteousness of God” had filled me with hate, now it became to me inexpressibly sweet in greater love. This passage of Paul became to me a gateway into heaven.53
The consequences of Luther’s grasp of the liberating gospel according to Paul are writ large in history.
It may well be that, since Augustine and Luther both found Paul to speak so helpfully to their own respective spiritual conditions, there has been an unwarranted tendency to ascribe to Paul the same kind of inward conflict before his conversion that they experienced before theirs.54 But what should be emphasized is that Paul’s gospel of salvation by divine grace has a living relevance not only to people who, like him, supposed they had attained a satisfactory standard of righteousness by law-keeping but also to those who, in one way or another, have known themselves to fall far short of such a standard and have suffered agonies of conscience as a result. The gospel according to Paul is not a message for one kind of temperament or one type of experience only. The Wesley brothers had a very different background and experience from Augustine and Luther, but it was Paul who spoke to their condition too.
(c) The Wesleys and the Evangelical Revival. In John Wesley’s wellknown account of the event which is usually called his conversion, but which he himself later described (in Pauline language) as the occasion when he exchanged “the faith of a servant” for “the faith of a son”,55 he tells how, in the evening of Wednesday, May 24, 1738, he “went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street [London], where one was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine”, he goes on, “while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation: And an assurance was given me, that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”56
If there is one event more than another that marked the birth of the evangelical revival of the eighteenth century, it was that. “The inextinguishable blaze which burned so brightly throughout the remainder of the century and beyond was nourished in the warmed heart of this one man at Aldersgate Street.”57 But similar awakenings were being experienced by others around the same time, and it is remarkable in how many of them Paul had a determinant part to play. A week before John’s awakening, his brother Charles came for the first time upon Luther’s commentary on Galatians, and “found him nobly full of faith”. Later in the same day, he records, “I spent some hours this evening in private with Martin Luther, who was greatly blessed to me, especially his conclusion of the second chapter, I laboured, waited, and prayed to feel ‘who loved me and gave himself for me’.”58 Four days later, his prayer was answered.
But another phase of Pauline thought made a powerful contribution to the evangelical revival—the phase expounded in the early 1670s by Henry Scougal in The Life of God in the Soul of Man.59 This treatise was well known to the Wesleys: their mother recommended it to them as “an excellent good book” and “as an acquaintance of mine many years ago”. John Wesley had a copy with him in Savannah, Georgia, and Charles in his Oxford days gave a copy to his fellow-student George Whitefield. It was the reading of this book that brought about Whitefield’s conversion in 1733: it showed him, in his own words, “that they who know anything of religion know it is a vital union with the Son of God—Christ formed in the heart. O what a ray of divine life”, he adds, “did then break in upon my soul!”60 In thus describing what happened to him, he echoes Scougal’s own language: “true religion is a union of the soul with God, a real participation of the divine nature, the very image of God drawn upon the soul, or, in the apostle’s phrase, it is ‘Christ formed within us’.”61 The “apostle’s phrase” comes from that letter to the Galatians which so emphasizes justification by faith, apart from legal works: Paul tells his Galatian friends how he endures birth-pangs on their behalf “until Christ be formed in you” (Galatians 4:19). It was perhaps the combination of these two aspects of Paulinism—the initial pardoning grace of God and the progressive inward work of the Spirit—that gave the evangelical revival its deep and lasting effect: concentration on the one without the other leads to a lop-sided form of religion.
(d) Barth and the Theology of Crisis. To come to more recent times, one of the most epoch-making theological publications of the twentieth century was Karl Barth’s exposition of the Epistle to the Romans, first issued in August 1918 when he was pastor of Safenwil in Canton Aargau, Switzerland. “The reader”, he said in his preface, “will detect for himself that it has been written with a joyful sense of discovery. The mighty voice of Paul was new to me: and if to me, no doubt to many others also. And yet, now that my work is finished, I perceive that much remains which I have not yet heard …”.62 But what he had heard he wrote down, and others heard it too. He compared himself to a man who, clutching in the dark at a rope for guidance, finds that he has pulled on a bell-rope, making a sound fit to wake the dead.63 The Catholic theologian Karl Adam said that the first edition of Barth’s Römerbrief fell “like a bombshell on the theologians’ playground”.64 The repercussions of that explosion are with us still, nearly sixty years later.
(e) Paul and democratic liberty. It can be argued that, in those parts of the world where the democratic process has been specially indebted to the Reformation and the evangelical revival, Paul, has exercised an indirect influence because of his direct influence on those movements. This was the judgment of Sir Thomas Taylor, a distinguished Scottish lawyer and churchman, who was a careful student both of Pauline theology and of the democratic process.
Justification by Faith means that salvation depends not on sacraments, not on what is done or not done by any priest or presbyter, but on the simple response of the believing heart to the Word of God in Jesus Christ. Observe what this really means; it is not just a theological figment. At one stroke it cuts at the root of the whole vast system of sacerdotalism, with its associated doctrine of works—penance, pilgrimage, fasting, purgatory, and all the rest. The Church is no longer a hierarchy of clergy performing indispensable rites for its members; no longer a caste of priests endued with mysterious, not to say magical powers at the word of a bishop; but the priesthood of all believing men, and a ministry authorised by the call of the Holy Spirit, by due examination of life and doctrine, and by the consent of the people concerned. Here you have the beginning of Scottish democracy, here and nowhere else. Accept this doctrine of Justification by Faith and the layman, the common man, John the Commonweal, at one stride comes into the centre.65
Sir Thomas referred particularly to “Scottish democracy” because he was addressing the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland convened to commemorate the quatercentenary of the Scottish Reformation; but his wise words have a wider reference. Paul looked forward to the day when the racial, religious, sexual and social prejudices or discrimination to which on principle he denied anyplace in the Christian fellowship would be banished from the whole new creation. And he placed a higher valuation on human personality than social or political democracy could ever do when he insisted that the weaker members of the community should receive special consideration because each of them, however insignificant in other respects, was “the brother (or sister) for whom Christ died” (1 Corinthians 8:11). Campaigner for spiritual liberty that he was, he gave one thing precedence even over liberty, and that one thing was love. But spiritual liberty is not really diminished by love; both together are imparted by the Spirit, and to serve in love is perfect freedom. In this, as in so many other respects, Paul has remained unsurpassed in his insight into the mind of Christ.