Meditations on the Letters of Paul. Herold Weiss
in individualistic societies. This means that we tend to interpret Paul in individualistic and dualistic terms. Paul, however, took human beings to be integrated units of body, soul and spirit; but each unit was a member of a corporate personality. In this, he was quite true to his Hebraic traditions.
As a good apocalypticist he affirmed the reality of the Fall that introduced evil into the world. It placed the world under the power of sin and “the god of this world.” Even if apocalypticism is now quite popular as a format for entertainment, it is not taken seriously in our scientific culture. This means that if the faith of Paul is to be taken seriously, his expression of it in apocalyptic terms must be transcribed into meaningful contemporary cultural terms. In these meditations I limit myself to bridging the cultural gap to make the message of Paul understandable in Paul’s own terms within his symbolic universe. I will not elaborate how his message may best be expressed in the twenty first century.
The time gap has two dimensions. In the first place, between us and Paul there are twenty centuries of human history, and one must make every effort not to be anachronistic. Besides there is a most important difference in the way in which we place ourselves in time. Paul, no doubt, understood himself to be living in the time when the Parousia of the Lord was to take place momentarily. We live two thousand years later and the Parousia has not taken place. Today it is impossible to announce an imminent Parousia and be credible outside the apocalyptic mindset. Again, my conscious effort is to make Paul’s understanding of time an important factor to be taken into account when reading him. I leave it to my readers to find in Paul’s faith a meaningful way to understand themselves in time once most people cannot envision its imminent end by the hand of God. Besides, with the coming of the atomic age, humans have demonstrated their capacity to destroy the world without God’s help. Thank you very much, God; but, no thanks. This gives a totally different perspective to our understanding of ourselves in space and time.
The letters make clear that Paul had a strong personality and a quick temper. He could flare up and issue anathemas as well as become contrite and appeal for understanding in the sweetest terms. They also reveal that he was not one of the leaders of the church, and did not enjoy wide acceptance during his lifetime. Envoys sent by the leaders in Jerusalem seem to have trailed him trying to undo what Paul had been doing. Paul admits that in the sight of others he made an unimpressive appearance. The Acts of Paul and Thecla, a second century legend, gives an admiring but not idealistic picture of him. “In stature he was a man of middling size, and his hair was scanty, and his legs were a little crooked, and his knees were projecting, and he had large [another version, “blue”] eyes, and his eyebrows met, and his nose was somewhat long, and he was full of grace and mercy; at one time he seemed like a man, and at another time he seemed like an angel.” The many details would argue that this straightforward description preserves something of a living tradition concerning Paul’s physical appearance.
Whatever his appearance may have been, no doubt, he was an amazing human being who took it upon himself to carry in his flesh the marks of Jesus (Gal. 6:17). It is also quite evident that he lived in the real world of human struggles and personality conflicts, His correspondence with the Corinthians reveals the serious tensions that developed between them and Paul. He refers to having made them a visit that resulted in a total break up of their relationship (2 Cor. 2:1). The catalogue of the many punishments he suffered while engaged in his service of Christ leaves no doubt of the reality of the world in which he lived (2 Cor. 11:23 – 28). He faced squarely the present, rather than escaping to the past or the future. It is because of this, that I find his writings extremely relevant.
My admiration of Paul does not mean that I do not read his letters critically, that is to say, seriously, or that I take everything he says as normative. I like to meditate on his letters to internalize how he lived his Christianity in the first century so as to live my Christianity well in the twenty first. I take very seriously his faith and I share it. How he expressed his faith in his time and culture gives me models with which to express my faith in my time and culture.
No doubt Martin Luther read Paul in a new way and did a great service to the future of the Gospel. His struggles with the entrenched theology of his day liberated many from the non-gospel of guilt and punishments predominant in his day. The battles Luther fought, however, need be fought no longer. Righteousness by Faith and Sola Scriptura have become common currency in the Christian landscape. God’s grace is now preached from every pulpit; Catholics have become as serious students of the Bible as any Protestant, and Protestants have become aware of the importance of Tradition as much as Catholics have long been. It is high time, therefore, to outgrow the tensions that separated Christians after Luther. Reading Paul with Righteousness by Faith and Sola Scriptura as determining factors can only prevent the reading of Paul on his own terms. The problem these days is, to a large degree, that Righteousness by Faith and Sola Scriptura have become slogans for modern ideological distortions of the Gospel.
Today many Christians read the Bible overlooking the actual authors of the different books, pretending that the Bible has only one author. This is a willful failure to look at the evidence. I think that the richness of the Bible can only be tapped when each one of its authors is given the opportunity to speak authentically in time and space. It is when Paul is allowed to be Paul that one gains a sense of his flaming faith, hope and love. When a biblical author becomes a real person expressing faith under inspiration, what is read takes on new meaning and authority. The message is more authentic when the human factor is given its due. I trust my readers will find in these meditations invitations to have profitable dialogues with Paul.
I: My Gospel
It is difficult to know how the disciples of Jesus, immediately after the crucifixion and the appearances of the Risen Lord, understood what had taken place among them during the last year and a half. Our first documents are the letters of Paul and the first among them is usually dated around the year 50 CE. The oral traditions that circulated during the twenty years between the crucifixion and the first letter of Paul eventually found their way into the written gospels. Since each one of them gives a peculiar voice and agenda to the teachings of Jesus it is not easy to distinguish what Jesus actually taught and what the Christians made of his teachings by the time the gospels were written. In any case, it is quite clear that the Gospel preached by Paul was a very radical interpretation of the crucifixion and the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Most notable in this regard is that Paul hardly refers to the teachings of Jesus. To Paul what counts is that God had revealed His righteousness. That is to say, God had achieved a significant part of the purpose for which He had created the human family. Of course, the only way to know about God’s efforts to achieve the purpose of creation is by knowing the Scriptures that tell of the dealings of God with the Israelites. They tell of the many ways in which in the past God’s purposes had been frustrated by the rebellions and the intransigence of the Israelites. They also record, however, the promises God made and the praises with which the people glorified their God on account of His fulfillment of the promises.
To come to terms with Paul’s Gospel it is essential to recognize that Paul is concerned with an existential problem. Anyone who looks at what takes place in the affairs of men and women in the world has great difficulty finding manifestations of the righteousness of God. This was already the case at the time of the exile of the Jews in Babylon. The prophets had been proclaiming the gospel of God’s retributive justice. Those who do good are rewarded for their goodness and those who do evil are punished on account of their evil deeds. Looking at what was happening when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians and the Israelites were in exile in Mesopotamia, the prophet Habakkuk understandably found the situation confusing. That the Israelites should be punished for their sins was taken for granted. Their exile was, therefore, quite understandable. That the Babylonians, a people who were famous for their cruelty, were being rewarded by giving them the spoils of Jerusalem and its wealth was totally incomprehensible. Habakkuk was therefore quite confused and asked the obvious question. Where is God’s justice to be seen?
The atmosphere that gave rise to Habakkuk’s question was the incubator that gave birth to a new understanding of history. The Hebrew prophets were the first to find meaning in life by looking at it in terms of its development in time, rather than its moorings in nature. This gives them the honor of having been the ones who discovered that history,