Keeping Faith with God

This is the 4th and final blog in a series  which began with  “Through the Law, I died to the Law: St. Paul and Torah.”  The immediate preceeding blog was Keeping Torah: Examples of Faith.    In these blogs I have been reflecting on St. Paul’s comment, “For I through the law died to the law that I might live to God”  (Galatians 2:19).    For St. Paul the failure of the Torah was that the Jews made keeping the Torah the center of their spiritual life, rather than keeping faith in God.   They should have done both, but became focused on the minutiae of rules. 

Once St. Paul recognized that Jesus was in fact God’s promised Messiah, he realized the Law had served its purpose – it had kept him faithful to God so that he could recognize what God was now doing for the salvation of the world.  He realized the Law was God’s gift to help him and all Israel be faithful to God, but with the coming of the Christ, the purpose of the Law was fulfilled.  The Law was meant to keep Israel faithful to God’s promises.   The Messiah was the fulfillment of God’s promises, thus the very thing the Law was preparing them to recognize.   For Paul adherence to the law came to an end because now faith was demanding that Israel recognize its Messiah.   The object of his faith was not the Law, but the Messiah – what God was doing for the world.  The Law it turns out was a temporary custodian to help keep Israel focused on and faithful to God.  The Law like the Scriptures were not the end in themselves but point to the Christ (John 5:39-40).   Now being faithful to God meant following Christ; the Law with its demands was shown to be a temporary tool for keeping faith in God.   

In Galatians 2:20 and Philippians 3:9, St. Paul uses a phrase in talking about Christ referring to the faith of Christ.  He says he lives by the faith of the Son of God.  Modern Protestant translators often changed the phrase to read that Paul lives by faith in the son of God.  But a number of current scholars (Morna Hooker or James Dunn for examples) have come to think that Paul intended to say Christ’s faith as the passages literally state.  St. Paul does think we all must live by faith, and Jesus is the greatest example of this.  Jesus is the incarnate Word of God but as a human he must live by faith to be the Savior of the human race.  As Christian we actually do live by His faith, not just our faith in Him!   Christ models faithfulness to us as we can see in Luke 22:41-44 where Jesus is praying on the Mount of Olives just before His crucifixion.  Ritualized religion cannot help Jesus at this point – he now places His full trust in God His Father for He has submitted Himself to the Father’s will in becoming incarnate and setting aside His divine prerogatives.  Keeping Torah cannot save Him from what He must endure to save humankind.  St. Paul’s criticism of the ritualism of the Jews is that they have replaced faith with religion.  Jesus keeps faith despite what religious conviction and authority imposes on Him on the cross.  Jesus does in fact model the faith which St. Paul so brilliantly explicates.   It is the faith of the man Jesus which keeps Him humanly oriented to the Divine Will.

Even in the Gospel Lesson of the woman with the flow of blood (Luke 8:41-56), we see this same message being offered.  The woman’s being faithfully observant to Torah cannot heal her.  Only when she reaches out beyond keeping Torah to touch Christ is she healed.  The Law declared her unclean for her hemorrhage and says she is unfit to be in public or to touch anyone – to touch Christ is to reach beyond what the Torah allowed.   Christ Himself emphasizes the theme of the limit and failure of the Law.  The woman had been healed surreptitiously and nobody knows she is unclean, but Christ calls attention to this fact, and the woman publicly confesses her uncleanness and having touched  Christ against the Torah prohibition.  It is at that  very moment that Christ proclaims it is her faith which has healed her.  Keeping the Law would not have healed her and in fact keeping Torah would have prevented her from touching Christ and being healed.   It is faith to which the Law was meant to bring us, not to keep us away from God!   The woman showed her faith by keeping Torah but her faith led her to Christ.  The sign of her keeping Torah is her desire to secretly touch Christ without letting anyone know she is actually unclean and thus violating Torah.  She kept Torah in order to be faithful to God and then was able to recognize God at work in Jesus Christ.  Through the Law she died to the law so that she might live to God.

As a further means to understand St. Paul’s point about faith and law, I will offer this non-biblical example:   Say you become ill and the doctor prescribes a regiment of taking medicine to help you recover.   You begin taking the medicines, but aren’t getting better, so you decide you need to more strictly follow the doctor’s rules.  You become obsessed with keeping the details of the doctor’s rules, yet your condition worsens.   The direction say take a full glass of water with your medicine, and so you decide a cup 7/8 full is not full enough.   If your focus on rigidly obeying the doctor’s order causes you to fail to notice that your health continues to decline, you have made the mistake that St. Paul ascribes to the Jews – you made following strictly the details of the doctor’s regiment more important than your improving health.   Something got lost in the process.  The doctor was not ultimately as interested in you rigidly following the regiment as he or she was in your getting healthy.  Slavishly following the directions regarding the medication has caused you to lose sight of the fact that the doctor was not concerned about you taking the medicine but rather about you getting better.

Leo Tolstoy wrote the story “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” in which Ivan has a terminal illness.  Ivan fanatically tries to keep the doctor’s rules to the minutest detail, yet no amount of following the rules can change the fact that his condition is terminal.  He loses sight of the big picture until the disease progresses to such a point that he has to come to grip with death itself.   Then he realizes that the rigid following of such rules is a distraction to the ultimate and important issues of life.

When St. Paul accepted that Jesus was the Messiah, he realized the Law had served its good purpose and so through the Law he died to the Law for the Law could not do for him what faith alone could – keep Him oriented to God’s current plan of salvation.   Keeping the Law was never the goal, rather it was always meant to help us keep faith with God.  Rigid keeping of the law could be done without the heart being brought closer to God, while faith opens the heart to being a through for God Himself.

Lest we falsely imagine St. Paul’s criticism of Torah-keeping replacing true faith is only directed at Jews, we must remember as Orthodox it is easy for us to replace faith in God with the religion of Tradition.    Orthodox Tradition serves the same role for us as the Torah did for the Jews.   We can follow all the details of liturgical ritualism or ascetic rigorism and still be lacking that faith in God which St. Paul taught.    Consider St. Paul’s words:

“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing” (1 Corinthians 13:1-3 RSV).

Through the Law St. Paul died to the Law because his faith causes him to be crucified with Christ.  He embraces the faith of Christ and understands that it is His faith which saves us.   We must never imagine that obedience to a tradition is equivalent to faith in the Son of God.  We could be like Zechariah so faithful to tradition that even God sees our righteousness and yet incapable of believing what God is doing in our lives.  We can also be like the crucified Christ –  stripped of the religious tradition and yet faithful to God even to the point of death on the cross.

Keeping Torah: Examples of Faith

This is the 3^rd blog in a series in which I am reflecting on St. Paul’s comment, “For I through the law died to the law that I might live to God”  (Galatians 2:19).   The first blog is entitled, “Through the Law, I died to the Law: St. Paul and Torah.”  and the 2nd blog is  Keeping Torah: The Means to the End.  For St. Paul the failure of the Torah was that the Jews made keeping the Torah the center of their spiritual life, rather than keeping faith in God.   They should have done both, but became focused on the minutiae of rules. 

Keeping Torah (Law) according to St. Paul was not the end result of Jewish faithfulness but rather the sign of that faithfulness.   Keeping Torah thus served to  to help Israel faithfully watch what God was doing in the world.   The tragedy as St. Paul presents it is that while the Jews kept the Law, even fanatically, they couldn’t recognize God’s plan and activity when He sent His Messiah to them.  The Law became for them the way to show how perfect they were in terms of obedience, whereas it was intended to keep them faithfully focused on God in order to recognize what God was doing and how they were to follow Him.    

Paul’s argument is that Moses and Abraham were all about keeping faith in God not simply obeying God’s rules.  They paid attention to what God was doing and they followed God; they did not simply follow old rules.  The Law wasn’t wrong, but when God acted in a new way the faithful were expected to keep faith in Him and follow what He was doing.   They were to respond in faith to the new activity by God.   Unfortunately, the Law became more important than what God was presently doing.  The Law became incarnate for the Jews but in hardened rock, whereas faith was meant to be kept in the human heart.  The Law became external to their very being, whereas faith was meant to work internally in the people to keep alive their relationship with God.  Keeping Torah was supposed to keep their hearts attuned to God.

As an example of what St. Paul is talking about consider Luke 1:5-23, the story of the priest Zechariah who was to become the father of John the Baptist.  First Zechariah is a priest – a man whose very position in Jewish society was to intercede before God on behalf of Israel.  He is to be a man of prayer involved in asking God’s forgiveness and blessing for His people.  Thus he is a man focused on God, a man of faith.  Zechariah in the Gospel lesson is described in verse 6

Righteous Zechariah

as being “righteous before God, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord.”   Zechariah keeps all the commandments religiously, and should thus be an example of the man of faith.  In this pericope Zechariah is chosen this day to go before the Lord to burn incense in the Temple while the people are praying.  The Temple itself is the sign of God’s presence in Israel, the very place where the Jews believed God dwelt with His people.  It should have been the very place where the faithful would expect God to speak to His people.   The scene is one of the man of faith standing before God in prayer awaiting God’s action and/or direction.  But then a very troubling thing happens to Zechariah.  God sends an angel to speak to him and Zechariah is totally unprepared for this!   Zechariah is disturbed and fearful – this is not what is supposed to be happening!   The Angel of the Lord tells Zechariah that in fact God has heard his prayer and will grant his petition.   Zechariah is literally struck dumb with disbelief.  We can only wonder, what in the world did he think he was going into the temple for?  Was it not to invoke God to continue to speak with Israel?   Who did he think he was offering incense to and to whom was he praying?   In fact, even for the righteous man Zechariah, walking in the commandments of the Lord had become routine and keeping ritualized.  The Scriptures proclaimed him as righteous for his perfect keeping of the Law.  Yes, he was being obedient and observant.  Yes, he faithfully kept the ordinances.  But, no, this did not translate into faith in God – looking to what God is currently doing, trusting God to act and fulfill His promises, and expecting to see their fulfillment.  Zechariah went literally to burn incense – to follow the ritual – but he was not prepared for nor expecting God to speak to him.  He was not at all prepared for God to answer his prayers.  He prayed in obedience to the law but this was not the same as having faith.  Zechariah is a prime example of what Paul describes as keeping the form of religion but denying its power.  Zechariah was keeping Torah, but his faith was not alive, he was keeping the ritual without any thought about keeping a relationship with God.   So standing in the temple, God’s dwelling place on earth, praying to God with the people, has become a ritual to perform, but is no longer a faith experience -  Zechariah is totally unprepared to hear from God. Keeping Torah had replaced having faith as he thought absolute obedience to  the Law was all God wanted from Israel. 

When Zechariah’s son is born, Zechariah is given his voice back and he sings a hymn of praise to God who fulfills His promises (Luke 1:67-80).  He doesn’t mention the Law in his hymn for He has learned that it is faith in God which God wants from His people not just obedience.  Obedience to the Law is not wrong and will earn one the title of being righteous, but it is no substitute for faith in God and a living relationship with Him.

Next blog:  Keeping Faith with God

Keeping Torah: The Means to the End

This is the 2^nd blog in a series in which I am reflecting on St. Paul’s comment, “For I through the law died to the law that I might live to God”  (Galatians 2:19).   The first blog was entitled, “Through the Law, I died to the Law: St. Paul and Torah.”  For St. Paul the failure of the Torah was that the Jews made keeping the Torah the center of their spiritual life, rather than keeping faith in God.   They should have done both, but became focused on the minutiae of rules.  

The proof of the problem for St. Paul is that when God acted and sent the Messiah, Jesus, into the world, the Jews were so intent on keeping Torah, and defining their relationship to God wholly in terms of keeping Torah, that they did not recognize what God was doing.  They didn’t see the Christ for whom the Torah was meant to prepare them and help them recognize because they made keeping the Law the goal of their spiritual life.  They had substituted an active faithful relationship with God by embracing the form of religion while denying its power.  They replaced faith in God with keeping the Law.  For St. Paul the Law ended up blinding them to God, and what God was doing for them.

As St. Paul sees it, the Jews had substituted strict adherence to the law for the faith it was supposed to show they had.  They became obsessed with watching who was or wasn’t keeping every jot and tittle of the Law, and became obsessed with the fact that since they alone were keeping Torah, they alone were favored by God.   They were supposed to keep faith with God in order to be a Light to the world’s other nations, but instead saw themselves as the only people God cared about.   They could not see that God was actually continuing to act in the world – sending the Messiah into the world for the life of the world, and for its salvation, to be the Light to the nations, to bring all people to Himself.

St. Paul in his conversion experience recognized that what he was aiming to perfect as a Pharisee – strict adherence to Torah — in fact had become a failure in faith; for the Jews had missed God’s chosen One when He appeared on earth.  Keeping Torah was meant to keep all of Israel faithful, but it wasn’t working as the Jews had rejected God’s chosen Messiah.    In Paul’s conversion he realized that God in fact had fulfilled His promises to His people in Jesus.  Keeping the Law did not prevent Paul from seeing the truth, rather what Jesus revealed to him was that the coming of Christ was the very thing for which keeping Torah was preparing him and all Jews.   The Law had done its job in Paul:  in seeing Christ, he was temporarily blinded which led to his proclaiming that Jesus was the fulfillment of God’s plan and promises.  The Law had thus kept Paul faithful to God, to His promises, to His plan.  But now that the Christ had come, Paul realized keeping Torah was not what God had wanted for His people, but rather keeping Torah was the means to the end; the end being remaining faithful to God.    Astoundingly, the strict adherence to keeping Torah had caused many Jews to reject Jesus as the Messiah and to demand his crucifixion for not keeping Torah!  It turns out that keeping Torah didn’t mean just strict adherence to the Law, but rather being faithful to God and His plan of salvation which He revealed in Jesus Christ.   Having faith in God was always both the goal and the desired behavior. 

Next:  Keeping Torah: Examples of Faith

Through the Law, I Died to the Law: St. Paul and Torah

In this series of blogs I intend to explore St. Paul the Apostle’s comment in Galatians 2:19 (RSV), “For I through the law died to the law, that I might live to God.”

St. Paul is the prime elucidator of the Christian idea of the justification by faith rather than attaining God’s justification through keeping Torah.  He was clear that it is faith in Christ which brings one to salvation, not keeping the Law.  However, St. Paul was not an anarchist nor even anomian, rather he had very clear ideas of morality based in the Jewish Tradition and Law.  Biblical Scholar James Dunn, in The Partings of the Ways, notes that keeping the Law for Jews was not the means to become part of the chosen people, rather keeping the Law was intended for those already within the community of God’s people and the means for distinguishing themselves from the other nations.

“For the devout Jew, obedience to the law was not a way of entering the covenant, not a way of winning a place in God’s favour. Obedience to the Torah was what God demanded of those already within the covenant, already part of his chosen people. The law told the covenant member how to live as a covenant member. ‘Covenant nominism’ is what the devout Jew did to express his Jewishness, that which distinguished him from the other nations.” 

What Paul objected to was exactly the Jewish notion that since only Jews had the Law, only Jews could keep the Law and therefore only Jews were capable of being saved by God.  St. Paul’s argument is that all along it was faithfulness to God which was essential - keeping the Law was only meant as a sign of faithfulness - it was never intended to replace faith in God as the basis for our relationship to God.   Paul’s argument is the Jews were meant to be a light to the nations, not the people who closed the door on them.  Any who see keeping tradition as the sign of their exclusively being saved by God have missed the point of godly Tradition.  Keeping Tradition like keeping Torah is only meant as a sign of our faithfulness but it is not intended to replace faith as our way of relating to the Lord God.

The point St. Paul is trying to make is that what God always wanted from His people was that they remain faithful to Him.  God’s intention was never to create a people who robotically obeyed the detail of Law, rather Law was given to help the people keep faith with God.   God did not create automatons but rather made us humans meaning we have to freely choose to believe in God and follow Him.

God always wanted us to live by faith, meaning that we actually trust God, believe His promises and live as if we actually believe them. We are to pay attention to what God is doing, not just what God did in the past.  The Law was given as a means for believers to demonstrate that they do have faith in God.  How would someone who believes in God live?   St. James has it right when he says, “I by my works will show you my faith” (James 2:18).  If we really believe God, we will do what God commands.  The Law was given to help us maintain a faithful relationship with God.

Here though is the issue as St. Paul defines it.  The Torah was given by God as the means for believers to demonstrate their faith (What difference does it make practically whether or not you believe in God?  You live a particular life style, one that God has revealed and commanded).  The Torah was also given to help believers remain faithful, to be constantly reminded that they are to live and act with faith in God as their prime motivator.  By being constantly faithful to God in every little deed we maintain a right and living relationship with God.  We pay attention to God and continually watch for what He is currently doing, where He is leading, what He expects from us.   This is a living relationship – not just keeping old rules, but an engagement with God today in whatever circumstances we are now in.

What happened however for the Jews, according to St. Paul, is that they lost sight of the fact that keeping Torah was always about faith and being faithful.  Keeping Torah was a means to an end.  Unfortunately, keeping Torah became the end in itself; the Jews came to value absolute adherence to the Law as the goal of the spiritual life, but lost sight of the fact that keeping Torah was meant to keep us faithful – to keep our eyes on God and what God is presently doing and what God wants us to do.

Next:   Keeping Torah – The Means to the End

Tradition: The Ship of Salvation’s Sail not its Anchor

St. Paul’s Epistles represent an interpretation of the Scriptures of Israel.  St. Paul is steeped in the Jewish Scriptures, and the Tradition which interprets those Scriptures.   It is the interpretation of the Torah which causes such tremendous conflict between Jesus and the rabbis of the Pharisaic Tradition.   Paul follows Jesus in interpreting the Scriptures of Israel and does so by claiming that he and Jesus are in fact the faithful interpreters of the Tradition.  It is Jesus who is the fulfillment of the God-inspired Tradition; thus Christianity is faithful to Tradition and the correct interpreter of this tradition.   Tradition, like Scripture, is not  made holy by being carved into stone, but rather by being interpreted within a community, by being the heart of the community’s relationship to God and the world.  Tradition is thus alive and constantly relating to the world, not written in stone and frozen in some past understanding.  For St. Paul Tradition is dynamic, creative, vivifying and renewing and keeps people focused on the goal – where God is leading us to, not the past and where we were.   Tradition is not the ship’s anchor, but its sail.   It consists not of repeating past teachings, but of interpreting God’s Word for the current generation.

When a tradition is handed on unchanged it loses its potency and has little meaning for the present. Some would go so far as to say that an unchanged tradition is dead, it has been killed…a vibrant tradition must be not only a conserving (conservative) force, but also an innovative one. The past tradition needs to be revivified for a new cultural and historical context….The only hope for survival lies in a tradition’s ability to provide a fresh word of hope in a new situation…this dynamic can be described as the interpretation of tradition; what gives a tradition its life is an effective interpretation for a new time and context. The success or failure of such interpretation (or re-interpretation) can result in either the life-giving continuation of the tradition, or its lifeless end… In addition, in a situation of crisis, fraught with uncertainty, entrenchment seems a safe path to walk… To those in the Galatian community, who would revert to the tradition unchanged, Paul emphasizes that this tradition must not be merely mimicked. It cannot be simply passed on unchanged, the community in Galatia needs to hear the word of God’s radically new thing, of God’s revelation in Jesus, of the end of order. For this community Paul ‘defines and defends the radically new in terms drawn from the old’… That is why abandoning the tradition is not an option for him. However, that importance is evident partly in the ability of the tradition to provide a fresh word of hope for a new situation…. He transforms tradition so that it continues in the living world.  (Sylvia C. Keesmaat, “Paul and His Story: Exodus and Tradition in Galatia”, Early Christian Interpretation of the Scriptures of Israel)

The Christian Temple: A People Not a Place

“We ARE THE TEMPLE OF THE LIVING GOD”  (St. Paul, 2 Corinthians 6:16)

In Paul’s own letters…the implication is clearly that the Temple no longer functioned for him as the focus of God’s presence and as  providing the means whereby a positive relation with him can be maintained.  Thus he transposes the category of the Temple from a geographical place to persons and their immediate relationship with God through the Spirit; ‘Do you not know that you are God’s temple…?’ ‘Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit?’; ‘We are the temple of the living God…’ (1 Cor. 3:16-17; 6:19; 2 Cor. 6:16) …. More striking still is the way in which the focus of divine presence (in ‘structural terms’) was  located for Paul not so much in the Temple as a sacred building, but in the body of Christ. … To the bulk of his first readers the  significance of this body imagery would be clear… In fact, we need look no further than the quite common comparison in Greek thought between the polis (city) and the human body… The point, then, which Paul’s first readers would readily have appreciated, is that the Christian communities of the diaspora could be said to have a corporate identity, as that of any city or corporation. … This means that Paul saw the small group of  Christians meeting in a member’s home as the body of Christ come together as church (1 Cor. 11:18). To be noted, then, is the fact that it was this coming and worshipping together, rather than the place where they met, which made them Christ’s body… For Paul, the point it clear: as members of the body of Christ, each has a function (Rom. 12:6), each has a ministry (1 Cor. 12:5), each has a charism (1. Cor. 12:5, 7; Rom. 12:4).       (James D. G. Dunn, The Partings of the Ways)

St. Paul’s Legacy in Christian History

As I was driving home from the Orthodox Missions and Evangelism Conference and from visiting my son in Washington, DC, I was listening to Luke Timothy Johnson’s lectures on St. Paul put out by the Teaching Company. 

In the final lecture (#12, “Paul’s Influence”)  Johnson comments on St. Paul’s continued influence on Christianity right down to the present day.  I overall appreciate the lectures because of the insight they gave into reading Paul   1) as a pastor not a systematic theologian (which means one might encounter varying or even opposing ideas just as an overweight patient and a patient going through unexplained weight loss might be given advise from one doctor that appropriately treats each patient but when the advise is compared it seems to be contradictary), and   2) as a person using classical Greek rhetoric in which he takes on different roles/faces/personalities/voices to make different points when addressing different issues or persons.    Paul’s responses are varied and not always compatible with other things he says or tones he takes because he is addressing specific issues, situations and persons.  He was not trying to be systematic but is always being pastoral in applying the Gospel to the issues his communities faced.

Johnson believes Paul was not a systematic theologian but rather offering moral pedagogy to his congregations.   However,  in later Christian development, Paul becomes read as a systematic theologian and thus systems are imposed upon his thinking which he himself never intended.   Interestingly the first persons in history to read Paul mostly as a theologian were  early Christian heretics – Marcion especially  regarded Paul as the only true Christian teacher.  The Christian Church however put Paul’s writings in with the Gospels and other apostolic writings because they intended Paul to be read within the Church and with all of the canonical scriptures not apart from them. 

Johnson points out three cases in which later Christian writers took Paul to build their own theologies.  Augustine tormented by his own sexual desires read Paul as like minded man and then imposed on Christianity many ideas about sex which were Augustine’s own personal issues and problems rather than Paul’s.    Martin Luther unable to keep the monastic rule perfectly read Paul’s ideas about Torah/Law as liberating him  from the demands of canon law  and monastic ritual and thus turned Paul into the champion for freedom from ascetical demands.   Karl Barth saw Paul as pointing out the deeply abiding tragic nature of sin entrenched in humanity.  In each case these Christian leaders took something from Paul but simultaneously in so focusing on specific statements of Paul lost the context in which Paul wrote.

Johnson cautions about overly systematizing Paul’s thoughts on sex, marriage, the political order, culture, gender or class.  Paul was brilliant on many issues, but he still wrote occasional letters from his limited experience of and perspective on the world.  Paul did not imagine a day in which Christianity would be the dominant social religion – his writings reflect his notion of Christianity being a minority and even marginalized movement rather than one which imposes its will upon the world.

According to Johnson Paul’s greatest contributions to Christianity are three:

1)    One can experience the living God and His salvation in the death and resurrection of Christ through the story and the community which tells the story.  Jesus represents the pattern for a new and transformed humanity.

2)    Paul is not preaching individualism but is teaching Christian community and the moral integrity of the community.  Christians are not taught individualism by Paul but rather in love to pursue the common good of the local Christian community to which they belong.

3)    Paul is constantly thinking on his feet about each situation that presents itself to him.  Paul is thus a model for Christian reflection and he refuses to offer  one-size-fits-all answers to his communities.  He rather challenges Christians to think about the implications of Christ on their lives and the implication of their own behaviors on the community.   He offers a pattern for Christians in every generation and culture to engage their world with the Gospel of love as lived in and through the Church.

Commissioning of St. Paul

 (James Dunn,  THE PARTING Of WAYS,  pp 160-161)

Conversion of Paul

“It is a striking fact that Paul never refers to his encounter with the risen Christ on the Damascus road as a ‘conversion’, but always and only as a commissioning.   … Paul understood the appearance as a commissioning for apostleship to the Gentiles.  …  the major factor was his conviction of a calling to take the gospel to the Gentiles.”   

 

Biblical Scholar James Dunn points out that nowhere in the New Testament does St. Paul ever refer to the change in his life caused by the encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus as a “conversion.” He always calls it a “commissioning” by God to go preach to the Gentiles. Paul never connects what happened on the road to Damascus to changing his mind about the Law/Torah. He always connects it to his changed mind about the Gentiles –  which St. Peter describes as once they were no people, now they are God’s people (1 Peter 2:10). According to Paul, Christ appeared to him not to change his thinking about the Torah, but to change his thinking about what it meant to be Israel.

For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel, and not all are children of Abraham because they are his descendants; but “Through Isaac shall your descendants be named.” This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are reckoned as descendants. (Romans 9:6-8 RSV). 

Paul’s argument that we are saved by faith is really about who is Israel – those who are genetic descendants of the Jews, or those who believe God’s promises? His thesis is: those who believe God’s promises are Israel, whether or not they are Jews according to the flesh.  He is saying that the true fault of Israel is they have forgotten that their real relationship with God was one of faith, not one of physical descent.  Paul writes that the Jews came to see the Law as being given to those of Jewish descent and thus converted God’s promises from a spiritual issue of faith into a matter of fleshly descent. They forgot that the entire purpose of the Law was to show their faith relationship with God, not their genetic descent from Abraham. The way they are truly descendents of Abraham is when they believe the promises of God, otherwise they are merely the physical descendants of Abraham, not the spiritual descendants. They follow they way of the flesh, not the way of the Spirit. They end up truly being the descendants not of Abraham-Sarah-Isaac but of merely of Abraham-Hagar-Ishmael (Galatians 4:21-31).    {An aside – probably why Muslims dislike St. Paul so much because Paul clearly sees Ishmael and his descendents as spiritually not related to Abraham the man of faith though being his physical descendants.  All the Ishmaelites have is fleshly not a spiritual connection to Abraham}.

For Christians, we are not descendants of Abraham according to the flesh.  We are not the true Israel because we have Christian parents or because we keep Tradition. We are God’s people when we believe His promises and their fulfillment which occurred in Jesus Christ.   This may lead us to show our faith relationship to God by faithfully living according to certain principles (Tradition, Torah), but just being stridently ritually and lawfully strict does not make us part of the people of God. We must believe God and His promises, not just be obedient to a set of rules –  such obedience at best is simply being of the flesh.

Returning to Paul’s commissioning by Christ -  Christ’s death on the cross meant according to the Law that He was cursed as a covenant breaker.  But St. Paul affirms that the one cursed by the law in Deuteronomy 21:23 had been raised from the dead and thus God is affirming His love, will and plan over Gentiles and extending His salvation to all those who have faith.   Christ died on the cross – a sign that He died outside of the covenant people, condemned for breaking Torah.  Yet God raised Him from the dead showing Christ is the inheritor of the faith tradition and the true Israelite.  By dying apart from the Torah and then being raised form the dead, Christ shows God’s favor and love is extended to all those who live apart from the law- to all Gentiles of faith.

The death and resurrection of Christ thus provides the necessary corrective for understanding what it means to be faithful to God.  It is not the case that only Jews who keep Torah can follow God.   All who have faith in God are now welcomed into God’s family.

Paul’s insight (his conversion!) is not that the Law is invalid or unnecessary, but that the Law had become a curse – first because it didn’t “save” the Israelites.  It was supposed to guide the Israelites in how to live as faithful people of

Paul's Commissioning Icon Sketch

God.  Instead the Jews came to see the Law as the guarantor that they were God’s chosen people simply because they had the Law.  The Law was stumbling block and curse for it came to prevent the Jews from seeing their faith relationship to God and instead seeing only a need to be ritualistically pure and fanatical.   Second the Law came to make the Jews see themselves as distinct and separated from the world as a result of their own purity, rather than seeing that they had a role to play – through their own faithfulness to God’s command to be a light to the world to bring all others to faith in God.   They were not supposed to try to exclude anyone from Christ, but were to open the Kingdom of God to everyone.  In becoming increasingly “Jewish” (distinct from the Gentiles)  by keeping the Law, the Jews had lost their way to the kingdom and were not leading others to the kingdom but keeping themselves out of God’s family.

Christianity and Islam: The Apostle Paul

This is the 8th and final blogin my series which began with  One Christian Looks at Islam Looking at Christianity; next was the two part  Christianity and Islam: Of Prophecy and the Prophet; then the two part  Christianity and Islam:  Conflict over True Christianity; followed by the two part Christianity and Islam: Jesus – Prophet, Messiah and Lord.   This blog follows Christianity and Islam:  Jesus – Prophet, Messiah and Lord (2).

Christians and Muslims agree that Jesus is a messenger of God and that He is properly called the Messiah.  They agree that Jesus’ birth was miraculous, and that Jesus was a miracle worker.   The Qur’an like the Gospel of John even refers to Jesus as the Word of God.   Where Christianity and Islam part company in their understanding of Jesus is that for Christians all the evidence of the birth and life of Jesus (which the Qur’an also accepts) proves Him to be Son of God.  The Christians say the evidence of the miracles of Christ mean Jesus is Lord, God incarnate, and one of the Holy Trinity.   Islam denies these points not believing that the evidence of Christ’s miraculous life justifies such an interpretation of Jesus.   Additionally, for Christians there is the fact of the death and resurrection of Christ which is the ultimate proof of the Christian understanding of who Jesus is and what he has accomplished.  The Qur’an does not accept the story of Christ’s crucifixion and thus denies to the death and resurrection of Christ any sacrificial importance let alone saving or redeeming power.   For Christians Christ ultimately triumphs even over death, the final enemy of God, which is the lesson Christians derive from the story of the resurrection.   In Islam Christ is merely a prophet who brings the same message as all prophets – submit to God.  Islam sees Christ as ultimately having no victory in his life except perhaps a moral victory.  They see true victory coming only with Muhammad who leads an army to victory and thus see God’s victory as a victory in this world.  In the world to come there will be no help from God as all that awaits each human is judgment.   On the other hand for Christians the victory of Christ extends beyond the grave into eternal life as Christ is victorious over sin and death.

For Muslims it is essential that Jesus himself points the way to Muhammad as it is Muhammad not Jesus who is the final prophet.   The Quran  “quotes” Jesus predicting the coming of  a messenger whose name is “Ahmad.”    The quote is not found anywhere in the canonical Gospels.   Islam uses Jesus predictions of the coming of the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth in  John 14-16 as Jesus predicting the coming of Muhammad rather than the coming of God’s Holy Spirit on Pentecost.    I am not aware if there is any non-canonical Gospel text which has Christ predicting a future prophet to follow Him, but indeed some of the stories of Jesus in the Qur’an which are not found in the canonical Gospels can be found in 3rd-4th Century apocryphal texts – texts the early Christians regarded as spurious or heretical.  (It would be interesting to know if Islam considers these texts as legitimate scriptures since they have in them stories that the later dated Qur’an contains).    For example the Qur’an has Jesus miraculously turning clay birds which he had formed into live ones, a story reported also in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas or the Arabic Gospel of the Infancy of the Savior.   

For Muslims, the Christian reverence for Jesus as Lord and one of the Holy Trinity is both wrong and forbidden by the Qur’an.   Islam blames to a large extent the Apostle Paul for distorting the true story of Jesus and the Gospel.  The Muslim missionary materials claim St. Paul was only interested in his own vision of the mystic Christ, but not interested in the historic person of Christ.    Yet, St. Paul places a clear emphasis on the Cross and on the last supper, events he reports and claims to have the received  and is passing along as tradition.    The Islamic criticism of Paul lacking an interest in history is because Islam itself does not accept the historicity of the events of Holy Week – the last supper, the crucifixion and the resurrection.   Christianity is based in historical events which St. Paul makes the heart of his Gospel.   St. Paul does not preach a different history, but proclaims the very history found in the Gospels.  He also comments on the implication of the historical events of the death and resurrection of Christ for all those who believe in God and who believe that keeping Torah is the only way to earn God’s favor.

 Islam claims its own view of Christ is historical, formed while he still lived on earth (not after his departure from the world), is the view Jesus had of Himself, teaches monotheism, is in line  with what Muhammad taught.  Muslims claim the Christian view on the other hand progressively evolved after Jesus departure from the world, is mythical and an interpretation, contradicts Jesus’ own teachings, is influenced by Greco-Roman polytheistic mythology and philosophy, was not taught by ANY of God’s prophets, was developed by St. Paul a self-appointed disciple.   Islam claims all prophets were Muslims, and so was Jesus.   It claims Christianity is an aberration created by Paul which rejects monotheism.   One booklet asked, “Is it not strange that Paul portrays the law of the mystic Christ as differing from God’s law?!”

The answer, I think is no.     Christians understand the Law of God as serving a purpose in preparing God’s people until the Messiah came.   The Law in Christian thinking is not the teleological goal of God’s plan.   Rather the Law was to help God’s people until the Christ came.   The Messiah is the goal of history and in Him the very purpose of the Law is fulfilled.     For Islam the goal in life is to obey and submit to God’s Law.   In this sense Islam is another form of literalistic and legalistic thinking that sees God mostly as a law giver whose task in life is to police His creatures, punishing or rewarding them for their behavior at the end of their lives.  Christianity however understands God’s deep abiding love for His creation and His desire to share His divine life with His creatures.   Thus the goal is not mere obedience but to freely choose love – for God and for one another.

The Muslim materials accuse Paul  of deception and of saying the law was binding on Jesus but not on Paul.   They claim such passages as Matthew 5:18-19 refute Paul.   But Jesus Himself is accused of violating the law by the Jews who rejected Him.   Jesus declared himself the Lord of the Sabbath and more important than the temple or the Torah because He fulfilled the purpose of both.    

St. Paul considers what Jesus said and did and then looks at what the purpose of the law was – it belongs to this world, not to the kingdom of God. The law was given because of sin but was not given originally by God in paradise.    The Muslim missionary material accuses St. Paul of pushing Jesus aside, yet Paul declared Jesus as Lord and Christ, which Islam will not do.    Islam really accuses Paul of both pushing Jesus aside and of untruthfully exalting Him.

St. Paul is not the founder of Christianity but is an Apostle of Christ.   His teachings are particularly troublesome to Islam because Muhammad did not understand or accept his teachings.   Paul is one of the Apostles and prophets upon whom God built His Church, Jesus Christ being the cornerstone.  Christianity does not have to deny or change any of the Scriptures of the Jews to come to their faith in Jesus as Messiah.   Christians accept St. Paul as being fully in line with the witness of the entire scriptures of Christians and Jews, of accepting and teaching all of the revelation of God which is found in the Bible of Jews and Christians.

St. Paul – The Church’s 1st Generation of New Leaders

Some commentators have noted that once St. Paul becomes a Christian he seems much more aggressive and bold about taking the Christian message to the Gentiles than are the apostles from among the Twelve.   St. Paul embraces the mission to the world in a way which the original disciples  seem reluctant to do.  Additionally, some have accused St. Paul of having changed both the message and the method of the early Church.  Muslims in fact accuse St. Paul of preaching a Gospel different than the one that the rest of the apostles were teaching.

However Christian tradition accepts the writings of St. Paul as inspired by God and belonging to the authentic Scriptures containing God’s full revelation.  The epistles of St. Paul were used by the early Christians to combat false teachings about Jesus.

In defense of St. Paul, we need to keep in mind that his experience of Christ and of Christianity differed from the original apostles.   Paul is the first Christian leader to emerge from outside of the original inner circle of disciples (the Twelve or the Seventy).  He didn’t experience the initial fear that those first disciples felt immediately on the day of Jesus’ crucifixion.   The first disciples hid behind closed doors in terror of themselves being persecuted or killed because of being the followers of Christ.  The first disciples had reason to fear not only their fellow Jewish compatriots, but also the Roman government which had carried out the execution of Jesus.

St. Paul on the other hand claimed to be a Roman citizen and so unlike the original disciples he may have felt some protection by the Romans, not just threatened by them.   St. Paul does not in his writing express the hatred for Rome that is an undercurrent in the Gospels.   Additionally St. Paul was part of the Jewish authority persecuting the Christians, so he wouldn’t have felt threatened by the Jews in the way the original disciples did. 

St. Paul represented a new generation of leadership – one which felt emboldened by the Resurrection and not so threatened by being a bearer of the Gospel.   St. Paul would soon experience the rejection  of and persecution by both his fellow Jews and by his fellow Roman citizens.  But Paul’s early embrace of Christ was shaped by his sudden encounter with the Risen Lord, not by three years of slow discipling that abruptly ended with the execution of the Master.    As one who received the Gospel of the Risen Lord and was converted by it, rather than as one who had been a disciple who experienced the death of Christ before His Resurrection, Paul’s path to becoming a Christian was different than that of the original disciples.  Remember,   the original disciples were reluctant at first to receive Paul.  St. Paul experienced and valued the notion of grace, of having received undeservedly the favor of God, and so was eager to share his received faith with others – he understood himself as having been grafted onto the original branch.    His life as a Christian came only sometime after the Resurrection of Christ and after Pentecost.  The disciples still were working through their own experience of the crucifixion of their Master, their own failure to believe, and the change that the coming of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost had meant for them.

St. Paul did not alter the Gospel message, but he seems to have grasped its implication for the world and for Jews who embraced Christ, and was willing to challenge the pre-Christian worldview which was still in play among the first Jewish Christians.  He was a true Apostle of the Lord who received the hand of fellowship from Christ’s own chosen disciples.