Inter-Varsity Press

Contents

Preface

1. What is Paul?
2. A funny thing happened on the road to Damascus
3. The stories behind the story
4. Reading someone else’s mail
5. The royal announcement
6. The crux of the gospel
7. The return of the King
8. One God, one Lord: monotheism and the Messiah
9. Living a life worthy of the gospel: the ethics of Paul
10. Gospelizing 101: Paul’s spirituality
11. Epilogue

From the PREFACE

This book is meant as an introduction to the apostle Paul for laypersons and undergraduate students and as a refresher for pastors and ministers. My objective is to get people excited about reading Paul’s letters, preaching Paul’s gospel and living the Christian life the way Paul thought it should be lived. My aim is to go deeper into Paul but without losing people in the mire of scholarly debates and complex technicalities. I want to show that what Paul has to say to the church today is both relevant and riveting. ...

1. WHAT IS PAUL?

‘What is Paul?’ This is the question Paul rhetorically posed to the Corinthians when he learned that factions were emerging in Corinth, factions centred around individuals like himself and Apollos (1 Cor. 1:10-17; 3:4-5). What is Paul, then? In his own words, he is a ‘servant’ through whom the message of the gospel rings out. A similar designation occurs at the beginning of many of Paul’s letters; for example, Romans: ‘Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ’ (Rom. 1:1). Paul defines his ministry and identity as that of a bond-slave of Jesus Christ with a resolute commitment to the call and cause of the gospel. To venerate Paul is to denigrate the Saviour whom he so passionately serves. Paul does not let himself become the centre of a personality cult. He puts his ministry in the context of planting and watering and points out that it is ultimately God who makes things
grow, so it is God who must receive the glory (1 Cor. 3:5−10).

We can change the question slightly from ‘What is Paul?’ to ‘Who is Paul?’ Part of the problem in answering that question is that we have a contemptible familiarity with him. Yes, we all know Paul, don’t we? He was the apostle to the Gentiles, witness of the exalted Christ, preacher of the gospel, the great theologian of the church and author of many epistles. On any given week, Christians read over Paul in their daily devotions in want of spiritual nourishment, preachers crawl through his letters in search of inspiration, theologians wrestle with the profundity of his thinking, and talk shows inevitably have something to say about his view of women and homosexuality.

Paul is our theological master, our pastoral mentor, our spiritual adviser and our missionary hero. Paul is the Christian who has become all things to all people. Yet just when we think we have him in our grasp, we find he slips through our fingers. At the point where we suppose we have finally understood him, he again confounds us and stirs our hearts and minds further. Just when we think we have wrestled with Paul and triumphed, we find him sitting on top of us with our faces in the dust. Alas, trying to nail him down can be like attempting to nail jelly to a wall. Paul, the great apostle, defies our caricatures of him; he deconstructs our neat little theological systems; he repels any attempt to put him in a corner and make him sit still: he remains the elusive apostle.

So how well do we really know him? If the Paul we claim to know looks and sounds a lot like us, then that is probably a good indication that we do not know him as well as we think we do. There is always a temptation to recruit him to our cause, to make our enemies his enemies, our beliefs his beliefs. Plus, our information about him is scant and fragmentary. Paul left us neither a travel diary nor a systematic theology textbook to follow. At the end of the day, we have only a ‘Reader’s Digest’ account of his life from Luke (in the Acts of the Apostles) and some thirteen pastoral postcards he sent to the churches of his day. What is more, Paul remains historically and culturally distant from our time, for he inhabited a world utterly foreign to our own. Notwithstanding our dangerous familiarity with Paul and the temptation to make him out to be one of us, the limited sources at our disposal and our physical distance from him should put us on guard before claiming too much about him.

However, all is not lost. If we can be mature enough to let Paul be Paul and treat his letters as windows into his world rather than as deposits of theo logical dogma, then we stand a chance of meeting him anew, letting him speak for himself in his language, on his terms and for his purposes. Our search is not for a disembodied mind lurking beneath two-thousand-year-old texts. Instead, our quest is for a teacher who has something he wants to tell us, if only we have ears to hear and hearts ready to obey.

So, why study Paul in the first place? For a start, Paul was the towering force behind much of early Christianity. No other follower of Jesus shaped the early Christian movement in the first two centuries as much as Paul did. The writings attributed to him take up 24% of the New Testament. Paul has been canonized as a saint, has had cathedrals named in his honour, has been the subject of television documentaries. Musicians set his words to music, churches divide over what they think he meant, massive tomes are regularly written about him, and stained-glass windows bear the image of the man whose face no one would recognize even if they saw it. What is more, in the history of the Christian church, times of reformation and renewal have often found their catalyst in fresh encounters with the apostle. Paul, the servant of Jesus Christ, has a fresh word from God for the church in all ages. It is by understanding Paul that we better understand the Lord he served, and through Paul we can discover new depths to Christ’s glory and new heights to God’s magnificence.

Paul is known best through his epistles, which is where he truly comes alive to us. He wrote letters for a variety of reasons: to encourage and rebuke congregations, to exhort individuals in their ministry, to defend his authority and ministry and to establish fellowship with Christians he did not know personally. Paul writes as a substitute for his personal presence and to convey his viewpoint in troubling situations. In divine providence, these letters were written for us, but were not originally written to us. All of Paul’s letters are occasional in that they are written to specific churches or individuals in specific circumstances. At times Paul requests that his letters be read widely and be given to other churches as well (e.g. 1 Thess. 5:27; Col. 4:16), showing he has an eye on the utility and value of his letters for addressing other churches too. Possibly one or two of Paul’s letters, particularly Ephesians, were circular letters and were designed for widespread circulation. Those after Paul who collected his many letters and bound them into one compilation did so because they believed his words were inspired by God and of great relevance to Christians even after Paul’s time. That is unsurprising, since Paul’s letters are simultaneously theological, missional and pastoral. His letters continued to be of relevance to Christians in environs altogether different from those of their original recipients.

The issues Paul deals with (divorce, how to live a God-pleasing life, confronting aberrant doctrines, fund-raising, fostering unity etc.) are applicable to our day as much as to his time. Paul writes for the people of God, for their edification and encouragement. The effective history of Paul’s literary endeavours is that he writes for the church local and universal, whether in Corinth or Chicago, Ephesus or London, Philippi or Sydney, the first century or the twenty-first century. He writes for the people of God in all ages and in all places so they can attain the full measure of maturity in Christ.

Paul is worth listening to not merely because he is an apostle and witness to Christ, nor simply for the fact that his letters are canonized as Scripture. Rather, it is because he has the heart of a pastor and his letters are concerned with helping and encouraging Christians in their corporate life. The people of God have much to learn from Paul about what it means to follow Jesus in a post- Christian, postmodern and pluralistic world: in short, a world becoming more and more conformed to the ancient world of Paul.

If you want to know what it means to follow Jesus in a world with gay marriages, where military threats loom in the Middle East, where different Jesuses are preached on television, where Christians are denounced for failing to embrace religious diversity, where some Christians even accommodate their faith to postmodernity, where Christians look more like the world than Christ, and where keeping Christians of varied convictions together in worshipful unity is increasingly difficult, then Paul is the author you need to read, since his experience is similar to yours. If you are sick of spiritual ‘milk’ and crave ‘meat’, if you want to have a faith that is simultaneously thoughtful and pastoral, if you want to know the big picture but don’t want to skimp on the details, then Paul is the author you need to read, for he is the one who most in the New Testament combines pastoral insights with profound theological reflection. A fresh encounter with Paul will leave your assumptions shaken to their foundations, your theological world turned upside down, your spirituality revitalized, your faith quickened, your love for God and Christ renewed, and your labour in the kingdom refocused. This is Paul for the people of God.

To uncover the mystery of Paul, I intend to cover a lot of territory and look at various aspects of his life, ministry and theology and the significance they hold for us today. But before we get down to business, a good way to get a basic grip on his career and thought is to look at five images of Paul reflected in the New Testament: persecutor, missionary, theologian, pastor and martyr. ...