Seven Cheers for St Paul!
At the moment Western church culture features a strong emphasis on Jesus the man and on being one of his followers. That’s great, but somehow in some quarters the Apostle Paul seems to have been forgotten in a dusty corner. (In some quarters it seems that the whole bible has been forgotten in a dusty corner, but that’s a different post.)
I don’t think Paul should be forgotten anywhere, so here are my seven reasons for saying, Hurrah for Saint Paul:
1. He is the reason we have Christianity in the Western world. Yes, Philip sent the Good News of Jesus to Africa and Peter went to the Gentiles, but neither of them went very far to do it. Paul went to Turkey and Europe, and if tradition is true two of his disciples took Jesus to Britain.
2. He knew Jesus in the same way we do. Paul never knew Jesus like Peter, James, John and the rest of the original twelve. Jesus left Earth a long time before Paul believed in him. It’s nice to know that the man who wrote a quarter of the New Testament didn’t meet Jesus in the flesh just like I didn’t.
3. He gets Jesus the Christ. Paul understood the idea of an anointed one (Christ) who existed before time, who created the earth, who had a whole history before being born in Bethlehem. Of course, Peter and John got this too. But Paul develops the concept of the Christ more than Peter. And he was a much less poetic/mystical writer than John, so he provides an important balance with his clear, specific language.
4. He wrote Ephesians and Romans. Try actually living out the instructions of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) without having really internalised the truths of Romans 6-8 and Ephesians 1-3. Go on, try it. You’ll fail.
5. He was real. He lets us see him learning, growing, changing, depressed, elated, frustrated, confused.
Look at the way he flopped in Athens, then completely changed his approach in Corinth, and then refined it in Ephesus.
Want to see Paul on an emotional roller coaster? Read 2 Corinthians.
6. He was a radical feminist (and believer in the equality of everyone). Anyone who thinks Paul had problems with women should read Galatians 3:28: ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’ Put that in your pipe and smoke it. And if you don’t think he personally practised it, read about his working relationship with Priscilla and Aquila.
7. He was focussed. You may be thinking, ‘But what about all those places when Paul says women ought to shut up and go grow their hair?’ All those passages are about church practice, not Paul’s theology. He was willing to be shackled to culture for the sake of the Good News.
Paul lived in a male-dominated society; women didn’t have a lot in the way of rights. Paul’s mission in life was to connect people to God through Jesus Christ. If Paul had tried to create churches that fully reflected his theology of equality they would have been empty. He believed that a woman without rights in the kingdom of God was in better condition than a woman with rights outside the kingdom of God. (Of course once they were in the church, he taught the true state of things.)
His focus meant that he was willing to put his formidable intellect to one side and ‘to know nothing… except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified. ‘ My intellect isn’t formidible, but I am acutely aware of how much I enjoy appearing clever. I imagine it was the same for Paul. I admire the way he subjugated himself to a great cause.
So there you have it.
Go, Paul!
1 August 2007 Jeff Gill
tags: leadership,
paul,
women
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