Part 2

Beyond Keynotes

A narrative exploration into the mind and heart of the enigmatic

Apostle of the New Testament

Introduction

Paul must be understood, if indeed, he can be. Peter believed so, but confessed the recondite nature of his writings, nevertheless, warning of the destruction of those, who being unteachable and weak-willed, always twisting the Scriptures to agree with their errors. Paul peered into the heavenlies and was given wisdom and revelation based on what he saw and heard. He came to understand his earthly experience from the heavenly perspective. His former understandings became invalid; all things were reinterpreted and new. Looking at earth from the vantage point of paradise changes everything; gives everything perspective.

Women are freed from degrading roles and are given equal dignity and respect with men. Abuse of power is intolerable in any relationship. Love is the defining force in all things; peace and joy, the effects. But this is the vision of life from paradise and except through faith coupled with violent desire the people remain earth-bound. This is the burden of Paul: to share his heavenly vision, knowing he must discomfit his hearers in their malaise or their religious conceit. He often seems harsh and overreaching with his demands for Christlikeness and then with  breath-taking sweeps of thought he lavishes his despairing disciples with a view of the Father-heart of God from which flows unconditional love for His creation, but in a special way, His covenant children. In his vision he sees a happy ending but he must navigate his people through a long, pain-filled, perplexing journey sustained by deep-settled faith that God is in control. It is the gift of enduring faith and an unshakeable hope in a glorious future.

Paul is a man with a healthy balance of living in the present reality victoriously and hoping for an even better and fuller life in the world to come. He makes no excuses for the doubters, the depressed, the fearful, and the angry. He takes Jesus command to be not anxiety ridden very serious. “Be anxious for nothing” is his practical philosophy. He knows that all things are working together for good.

Nor did the past haunt Paul; it gave him perspective. He, like everyone, could recount an inglorious personal past littered with foibles, failures and faults, but for him the past life of sin and failure is the necessary backdrop for understanding the grace of God in Christ; no regrets, just a liberating sense of moving forward, forgiven always forgiven, then, now and forever.

If Paul were here today he would no doubt wonder at the grand institution called the Church which claims his writings as the greater part of its charter. The doctrinal confusion, political intrigue, ostentatious pomp and materialism would horrify the Apostle.

The church to Paul was Priscilla and Aquila, Phoebe, Epaenetus, Mary, Andronicus, Junia, Amplias, Urbanus, Stachys, Apelles, the households of Aristobulus and Narcissus, Herodion, Tryphosa, Tryphena, Persis, Rufus, and his mother, Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermas, Patrobas, Hermes and the brothers with them, Philologus, Julia, Nereus and his sister, Olympas and all the saints with them. This was the church in Rome. To him the church consisted of individuals connected by holy love, with a mandate to live in humble and simple unity, avoiding those who would play politics in the church, causing division. Such are interlopers, self-serving, smooth talking deceivers, wolves in sheep’s clothing.

Paul addresses the status of Israel, God’s purpose for Israel, and its future, but does not care to contribute to the Rabbinic commentary. He comments on the law in regard to its fulfillment in Christ and makes use of it for the instruction of his Gentile converts, especially in response to the aggressive incursion of Judaizing interlocutor’s intent on a sectarian interpretation of the Christian message. He essentially rejects the rabbinical tradition, representing himself and his message as completely and altogether different than the Pharisees’ religion. He called these teachers of Judaism “false brethren” and indicted them for bringing the converts into bondage, robbing them of their liberty in Christ.

Paul was acutely aware of his different calling, at first agonizing over and questioning its validity and his consequent status but in time he arrived with deep convictions at the conclusion that his calling was special and would take him in a different direction than that of Peter and the other apostles. Their message would be to the circumcision and his to the uncircumcision. They would continue to identify with and be influenced to an extent by rabbinic tradition; he would summarily reject rabbinical interpretations.

Paul became aware of the significance of not being of the twelve who knew Jesus in the flesh and were called and commissioned to preach the gospel to the Jews in Israel as well as those of the Diaspora. Having never seen the earthly Jesus, his interpretations were free of earth tones and trappings. Paul’s relationship with the resurrected Jesus is wholly spirit-formed and liberated from the Jewish predisposition toward priest-craft, temple, and sacrifice, rituals of washings, numerology and innumerable and sundry ordinances. It was being framed in other-worldly terms. Having seen and experienced the third heaven, he found himself continually challenged by the limitations of earth languages and specifically the language of the Jew’s religion. The earthly things point to heavenly things; symbols to realities, measurable to immeasurable, physics to metaphysical worlds. Unlike in the Old Testament, the Gospels and most prominently in the Revelation where numerology is thematic with numbers and combinations of numbers recurring with conspicuous emphasis, in Paul, the absence of numerology is signal. Paul was a mystic without a mystical tradition. His esoteria did not draw from the schools nor the Jewish, in point of fact, he was careful to instruct his converts to reject the pursuit of the mystical through these arcane systems. In the Old Testament symbols represented a reality not yet revealed or understood in clear terms. With the incarnation the symbol and its object meld, thus the declaration of Jesus (in regard to the communion bread) “This is my body which is given for you; do this in remembrance of me”. The symbol disappears into the reality. When the symbol lingers, the reality is obscured and eventually disappears leaving an empty, institutional form well-suited to the soulish inclinations of religious initiates. Paul’s use of symbols was scant and when he mentions such symbolism as baptism, bread and wine he clearly and emphatically obviates the symbols as the coming of a king obviates his forerunner who announces his arrival, rendering the forerunner no longer necessary. As with John the Baptist, the forerunner of Jesus, so it is with every symbol that precedes and points to Christ, they must decrease that he may increase. So, baptism in water practiced by John the Baptist, then Peter, and initially by Paul, though elegant in its symbolism, eventually disappeared into the reality of real baptism into the real Christ by the Spirit. Therefore we understand the lack of appreciation of symbol-keepers for the declaration of Paul to the Corinthian church, “For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel…” It was a difficult but thorough transition from Jewish symbolism to Christian reality; from earthly substances to heavenly, from things seen to things invisible, but Paul made the transition taking many others on the same journey.

Regarding the gnosis of symbolism Paul deferred to John, the writer of the quintessential body of Christian apocalyptic, rife with symbolic imagery. The message of Paul was in no way to be understood as subliminal and arcane, on the contrary, he constantly strained to reveal the secrets of the faith and uncover the hidden things. His burden in teaching was to resist Gnosticism and fanciful interpretations, focusing on a conscious understanding of truth as it related specifically to gentile  Christians who were not versed in Jewish metaphorical traditions but were more generally given to the concrete, matter-of-fact Greek way of thinking. Paul was well aware that he was teaching, for the most part, individuals who did not share his Jewish traditions or worldview. His converts did not immediately become Judeo-Christians. They were Greco-Roman pagans and would learn and assimilate truth accordingly; more left-brain than right. There is a salient Divine order which culminates in Paul. The order begins with the foundation of the Hebrew Law and Prophets. Then the Hebrew messianic fulfillment in Jesus of Nazareth as announced and confirmed by the last representative of the Law and Prophets, John the Baptist, and then the twelve disciples and later apostles of Jesus to the Jewish people in Judea and beyond to the Diaspora with the message of Christ. Finally, the Divine calling and appointment of Paul as one specially commissioned to bring the truth of Christ to the gentiles, wholly unconstrained by Jewish tradition.

Paul was uniquely suited for the difficult task of preaching a Hebrew-produced and defined messiah to Greco-Roman pagans, most of whom possessed little or no knowledge of the Jewish people or their religion. He was a Roman citizen, expert in the Greek language, culture and history, as well as a rabbi of Pharisaical Judaism, qualified both to accurately comprehend the Hebrew aspect of the messiah as well as to properly interpret messianic truth to uninitiated Gentile pagans. Paul’s Christ was both cultic and cosmic. His messianic hope encompassed the entirety of the inhabited creation; heaven, earth, and hell, celestial, terrestrial and sub terrestrial.