Readings for such a time as this(4): - from: Paul of Tarsus _____________ Damascus One phase of religious thought in Pauls Jerusalem we have not yet touched—the Christian movement. If it is hard to be at all precise about the currents in Judaism, it is at least as hard to be certain about the early church in Jerusalem. Something turns on the date at which Luke wrote the Acts, and still more on the sources which he used, and the degree of knowledge which he really had of Palestine. When he wrote the gospel, he explained his purpose and plan in his preface, and scholars of late years have successfully studied his method in careful comparisons between marks gospel and Lukes borrowings from it, and they have also made out another source which both Matthew and he used in addition to mark. In the latter part of Acts it is plain that Luke depended on Paul himself and Pauls friends. That he was with Paul on some parts of the journeys seems most probable. Whatever sources he used for his account of the Jerusalem church, it is hard to think that they were at all of the same historical value as those which he used for the gospel, or as his own notes of Pauls talk and of their journeys together. It is fairly plain that, while a man of wider range and far more literary capacity than mark, and clearly dissatisfied with marks style and language and general usage of greek, Luke was very faithful, as ancient historians were perhaps too apt to be, to the source before him. The source (if not sources) for the early days of the church in Jerusalem must rouse a good many suspicions, unless we are to say that Luke is responsible for the parallelism of the miracles with Jewish history and legend, which I think can hardly be urged. Luke is accused at a later point of making all sorts of eirenical adjustments, which it does not concern us to discuss in detail; he may have found Pauls statements and those which he got elsewhere hard to reconcile. Narrative at all events was a gift denied to Paul. It may be possible to disentangle everything; people have tried it in various ways; but happily it is not our task. When we come to ask about the church in Jerusalem before Paul joined it or even began to persecute it, we have the full disadvantage of depending on a not too critical historian writing of a land and situation, which he did not intimately know, in dependence on a very curious authority. It is quite clear that the community was full of fervour and courage, quite changed from what it had been before the Crucifixion. Then it had been uncertain of the mind and the future of Jesus, and very slow to take in what he said; it had scattered when the attack was made upon him. Now it had a testimony to give—that Jesus was raised from the dead; it was perfectly sure of this, and stood all sorts of persecution. But it was still confused on many points; it was full of the Holy ghost; it gathered adherents freely, but not all of them, we are told, of reliable quality (Acts 5:1-2). Its ways were odd; it elected an apostle by a final drawing of lots, and it practised communism—the latter leading very soon to trouble, while the former practice was not, so far as we know, repeated. Altogether there is, in spite of all the enthusiasm, the courage and benevolence, a want of nearly every other quality that we associate with the mind of Jesus. Luke gives us a number of speeches delivered by Peter. To sir William Ramsay all students of the new testament are indebted for a great deal of new light on Lukes fidelity to the facts of the Roman empire and its geography—a signal contribution. But when he asks us to believe that Luke is verbally faithful to Peter, so faithful as to keep a greek word which Peter used in a speech but afterwards discarded for a better in his epistle, those who study ancient historians can only open their eyes in amazement. When he also turns the angel of the Lord who came upon Peter —the normal term for a theophany in pagan narrative and for an angels coming in the new testament—into Manaen, Herods foster brother, he makes Lukes procedure the harder to explain. Scholars generally will not want to press the verbal faithfulness of those speeches; it will be a good deal if they are free to allow some correspondence of content. Certainly the speeches are quite different in texture from the recorded talk of Jesus in the synoptic gospels, which is all short—it is fragmentary, and one sees that it is authentic, saved by its own life and humour and pungency; the story of the Prodigal son is the longest connected piece. Peters speeches are very different and a cautious historian will handle them uneasily. Dr Hastings Rashdall holds that, when we reach the speech of Stephen, we have far more certainly a genuine and most interesting monument of the earliest Christian thought. With Stephen and Gamaliel we come into the area where Paul can be counted among Lukes authorities, and Paul apparently had reason to remember the gist of that speech, perhaps some of its words. Some light may be shed on that early church from what is actually known of its later history, which is little; from the epistle of James, and from the character of Jewish Christianity so far as it kept aloof from the general body of Christs followers. There results a rather slow and uncertain Christology; Christ is not all that he becomes to Paul, to the writer to the Hebrews, to the fourth evangelist, to the author of the apocalypse. That early church was the trustee of the sayings of Jesus, and preserved them, for which alone we owe it a boundless debt; it comprised the witnesses (before Paul) of the resurrection and it bore its testimony; it had something to say of the ascension—a matter easier for men who believed in a geocentric astronomy and a solid sky, with Horace, perhaps, and the apocalyptist. It was not however very clear as to the person and work of Christ. Even the speeches of Peter, while touching on the resurrection, the ascension and the second coming (Acts 3:20), do not go beyond calling Jesus the holy and the just, prince ἀρχηγόν of life (Acts 3:14, 15), prince ἀρχηγόν and saviour σωτῆρα (5:31), and associating with him forgiveness (5:31)—the last a very important point, if not thrown back by natural reflex from the language of a later day. Finally, the early church remained very much unaware of where it was going. For, to put the issue bluntly and at once, it seems hardly to have been conscious that it was in any peculiar sense a church. the word may involve not a little anachronism, and it certainly suggests too many associations, too many controversies, to be used of this body of early Christians in Jerusalem without further reflexion. We must try to picture a group of people, as we have seen, without any very clear Christology, but conscious of a new loyalty and of a new experience, which they wished to share with their neighbours—so happy it was. We read of Peter preaching apparently on the street from a door or a window (Acts ii.) but also in Solomons Porch of the temple (Acts 3:2), which was in fact for a time the recognized meeting-place of the group (Acts 5:12). There were gatherings of avowed adherents of Jesus by themselves, but the routine or ritual—we must not be too precise—of their religious life had still to some extent a centre in the temple; day by day they continued with one spirit (or mind) in the temple (Acts 2:46). At the very end of the Acts we find the same thing; Paul, on the advice of the brethren in Jerusalem, went through some conspicuously Jewish rites in the temple (Acts 21:26, 27)—a procedure not very consonant with the latest of his writings, which show a further development. How strange all this was may not occur to every reader of the new testament at once. But when one recalls the episode of the cleansing of the temple by Jesus, and reflects upon what he found there—a market full of birds and cattle, the whole apparatus of money-changing and buying and selling, a den of thieves reeking of cow-dung and blood, and crowded with the agents of a mercantilized religion—it grows strange that men and women, taught by Jesus a new way in religion, could still endure to worship in such a place along with those who killed him; but they did. We read, moreover, that a great crowd of the priests became obedient to the faith (Acts 6:7); and, if we ask whether they continued to minister along the old lines in the old place, it is hard to think that they abruptly ceased to do so. But how long did they continue, and how came the cessation of their sacrificial service? The reference to the synagogue of the Cilicians reminds us of a double strand in Judaism. The temple obviously did not minister to all the spiritual needs that the synagogue had taught Jews to recognize. The practice, maintained by Paul for years, of resorting to the local synagogue, wherever he went, and beginning his mission by preaching there, suggests that Stephens activity was similarly in a synagogue, and that it was in the synagogue of the Cilicians he preached full of charm and power. there was bound to be cleavage. Temple and synagogue were inevitably to be impossible centres for Christian preaching. There could not permanently be much sympathy between men who said that Jesus is Lord and men who said Jesus is anathema (1 Cor. 12:3). Division, taking the form of persecution, was inevitable and it cleared the issue. The strange thing is that temple and synagogue could have been used so long. Professor B. W. Bacon of Yale distinguishes two persecutions, the first by the priestly party on political grounds, which soon ceased; the latter a more important one raised by the clash of Stephen with the Hellenizing Jews, and the Cilicians among them. And here Paul comes into the story, as the church has never forgotten;—the witnesses laid down their clothes at a young mans feet, whose name was Saul. With what synagogue but that of the Cilicians could that citizen of tarsus be connected? He must have been involved in the controversy with Stephen from the very first; he was not built to be neutral or even moderate. So he goes on and makes havock of the church, entering into every house, and haling men and women committed them to prison, and thereby disseminates the contagion he is trying to stamp out. From the story of Stephen and his speech, from the standard objections of the Jews to early Christianity, from Pauls own letters, we may feel our way to some account of the ground he took in opposition to the new religion. Luke may have thrown back into the early period the fuller recognition which the differences between the Jewish and Christian communities at last reached. We have to remember that Pauls was a life of revelation, however we define the term; and he did not necessarily see from the beginning all he discovered with time, nor need we suppose patent to the insight of the Jews of the first half-century what a later generation could see without any insight at all. The two religions, as the new one developed, were bound to move further and further apart; from the first it was inevitable. Jesus was not crucified for nothing by the common action of priests and Pharisees. If his disciples did not guess the reason, his enemies were clear enough. With those enemies Paul was consorting, and what they saw and spoke of, it is hard to suppose him slow to understand. We may summarize the main points under four or five heads. Whatever Israel might properly hope for, or expect, in a Messiah, if a Messiah there was to be at all, it was clear to Paul and his friends that Jesus could not possibly be the Messiah. If Christian historians produced pedigrees connecting him with David, they also preserved enough of his talk to show that he set very little by the connexion. How say the scribes that Christ is the son of David? he asked. Perhaps the Messiah was not to be strictly a son of David, but no one as yet had suggested that he was to be a peasant, a carpenter, a homeless vagrant; that, so far from restoring the Kingdom to Israel, he was to be crucified by the foreigner. A Messiah crucified was to the Jews a stumblingblock, a contradiction in terms; and so it remained. The law had said quite plainly that he that is hanged is accursed of god, and had given special injunctions for the immediate burial of such a person before sundown; his body was not to remain all night on the tree that thy land be not defiled. We know that this was a passage which Paul thought over, and in later days it gave him a comfort that was not to be expected. The Christian propaganda of the crucified Jesus as the Messiah had thus in it everything to revolt a patriotic Jew, who loved his race and its hopes, who was conscious of the mockery of the foreigner, who believed the law to be the very word of god, given by angels, and in a manner of speaking almost an incarnation of god. The cross was for centuries the point of attack, and while, as we see, it became the very centre and inspiration of Pauls religion, he remained sensitive to the shame of it. He knew exactly what men felt and said about it, because he had felt and said the same. As for the resurrection of Jesus, there again Paul had opportunity to learn how it affected men. The greeks at Athens simply laughed when he spoke of it, and the discussion was at an end at once. Luke tells us that, from the first, the priests and Sadducees were vexed that the Christians preached through Jesus the resurrection of the dead —it was all counter to Sadducee belief, as we know. That Paul counted the story a sheer fabrication, seems confirmed by the emphasis which, later on, he always lays on the risen Jesus, and on his vision of him alive. Those who alleged that Jesus was raised from the dead were false witnesses against god, so that their talk was not only silly but sinful. Another point was the law. Luke is very fitful in his treatment of chronology; apart from his statements that Paul was eighteen months at Corinth (Acts 18:2), two years at Ephesus (xix. 10) and two years a prisoner at Caesarea (xxiv. 27), he gives no dates of any consequence in the Acts. The reference to the coming of Gallio, while Paul was at Corinth, gives us our solitary fixed date. Gallios proconsulate fell in a.d. 52. We are left to guess how long was the period between the Crucifixion of Jesus and the conversion of Paul; it has been estimated at something vaguely between one year and six. In that interval it became perfectly clear to people who cared for clearness that the gospel was not going to strengthen the position of the law. When Jesus said: Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets, and predicted that no jot or tittle should go unfulfilled, either Matthew (5:17-20) or his modern interpreters may be accused of lack of imagination, if the one, or the other, really suppose that Jesus meant his followers to maintain the law of moses, as the Pharisees tried to keep it. It was very early evident that, in the new relations with god which Jesus had made possible for men (long as it was before the church made up its mind to a definite theory to cover the facts), one thing at least was certain—the days of righteousness by the law were past, the law was becoming obsolete. According to Luke, it was not till Peter had committed himself with Cornelius that the question was discussed with any urgency among Christians at Jerusalem, and the rest of the Acts is never long free from echoes of the controversy; so conservative can Christians be and so unobservant. Their enemies saw the end a great deal more clearly and more quickly. Accordingly one part of the charge against Stephen concerned the law. The scandal put about was to the effect that we have heard him speak blasphemous words against moses and against god (Acts 6:2). When he is brought to trial, it is put more explicitly. This man ceaseth not to speak blasphemous words against this holy place and the law; for we have heard him say, that this Jesus of Nazareth shall destroy this place and shall change the customs which moses delivered us (6:13). To change customs was tantamount to destruction of nationality. Stephens defence turns chiefly on another controversial point, really of more significance, viz., the suffering, rejection and death of Jesus; but at the end he touches on temple and law, not obscurely for those who understand, while to his court it meant that he pled guilty. Howbeit the most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands; as saith the prophet, Heaven is my throne, and earth is my footstool: what house will ye build me? saith the Lord: or what is the place of my rest? Hath not my hand made all these things? this, coming after a survey of Israels history, and with the conclusion: Which of the prophets have not your fathers persecuted? and the counter-charge that the court trying him have received the law by the disposition of angels (as it was ordained by angels) and have not kept it, confirmed the worst alleged against the Christian community. They had principles of universalism, which must tell against Israelite privilege; they were not loyal to temple and law. To translate all this into blasphemy against moses and god was no more than controversy can always manage. And, latent in his defence, was a suggestion of an explanation for the sufferings of Christ, which appears not to have been lost on Paul, hostile as he was for the time. In any case we have a strong indictment for an ardent young Jewish patriot to bring against the new sect—the change of Israelite custom, involving the disappearance of Israels nationality; contempt for the law and a clear menace to the laws continuance and validity; a hideous parody of the messianic hope; and, implicitly, the final abandonment of Israel to Roman rule. There were also matters personal to Paul; if their view of God was right, all his endeavours after righteousness according to the law were misdirected and needless; he had blundered, and wasted his energy; what was gain to him was after all really loss;—a conclusion that no man could welcome. And we must not forget the mans passion for truth and his resentment of lies; he could not but resent the falsehood of the resurrection story in any case; how much more when it involved god? no wonder that Paul was consenting to Stephens death—or, to render the Greek συνεδοκῶν in language of our own day, that he thoroughly approved of it. I cannot help feeling that Gamaliels action had a share in developing the persecutor in Paul. Luke tells us how, at an early appearance of the apostles on trial, there stood up one in the council, a Pharisee, named Gamaliel, a doctor of the law, had in reputation among all the people, and advised the Jewish authorities to wait and see; to let the men alone; for if this counsel or work be of men, it will come to nought: but if it be of god, ye cannot overthrow it; lest haply ye be found even to fight against god. Hesitation is the badge of the scholar tribe. Erasmus was a difficulty to men of his day; he would not definitely side with Luther nor wholeheartedly condemn him. We may readily believe that this information from within about Gamaliel came to Luke from Paul, and that the moderation of his teacher impressed him, both before and after his conversion. If afterwards he felt the wisdom of the older man, at the time it would have been less than human nature for the young and ardent Paul not to resent the trimming of the cautious Gamaliel; and Paul always had plenty of human nature, and was quick to respond to its promptings. It would not be unnatural if this spectacle of vacillation in one whom he regarded fired him with indignation, and if indignation drove him (as it sometimes did later on) into action more fierce than we might properly have supposed native to a disposition so obviously built for friendship. But after all there would be little to surprise us in that. But there is another phase of the matter yet to be considered. In two narratives of the vision at the gate of damascus, we read that the words: It is hard for thee to kick against the goad were among those that came to Paul. It has been suggested that the phrase was from Pindar; but the indignant ox, harnessed to the plough, tossing the yoke which it cannot throw off, and kicking out at the ploughman whom it cannot reach, was not a sight for which it was necessary to go to the poems of Pindar. Paul may very well have seen it that very morning on his journey; and the poor beast, kicking in vain at a man separated from it by the length of the plough, and only hurting itself afresh with each kick at the inevitable yoke, may have stayed in his mind as a picture of humanity, till it was brought home to him: thou art the man. It is most likely that, in spite of his indignation with Gamaliel, Paul felt some qualms suggested by his friends uncertainty—qualms none the easier for his trying to overcome them (as men do) by committing himself more deeply. It has already been suggested that he had also to fight against the consequences of long familiarity with the Hellenistic world; here too he was divided against himself, and (as befalls men in such a state) he was the more violent on one side because he wished to be on both sides. A youth passed in gentile surroundings, a manhood devoted to work among Gentiles, hang together; and somewhere under the surface it is hardly overbold to surmise that a lifetimes instinct was making a fierce struggle against the theory of a season—his humanism against his tribalism; and the latter betrays the uneasiness of its temporary triumph by its violence. Then again, in the speech made from the steps to the crowd in Jerusalem, we are reminded by Paul himself of his part in the martyrdom of Stephen (Acts 22:20), planned by men of his own synagogue, in all likelihood with his approval from the first. Whatever part rewriting—condensing, abridging, altering things to keep them the same—had in Lukes work, we may be pretty sure that he was better informed of Pauls mind, and even of his usual ways of speech, than he was in Peters case. Ordinary probability supports us here. What impression must that death of Stephen have made on a young man, bigoted, but affectionate and open-hearted, and uneasy in mind? We know from himself how his nature was torn in two by the struggle against sin; and here was a man, being slowly butchered, and entirely at peace with god. Paul felt the contrast; he was himself not at peace with god. The miserably slow process of the death left Paul the longer time to study the dying man, his face, his bearing, and the scene. A century and a half later, Tertullian tells us of the effect of the martyrs death in his day,—the tranquillity of the martyr amid the hideous snouting and hatred of the mob, the uneasiness of the spectator, and the force of the contrast. No one would have wished to be killed, he says, unless he knew he had the truth. It seems, indeed, as if Tertullian were telling his own story there; and there is a good deal in common between Tertullian and Paul—the swiftness of mind, the passion for truth, the headlong temperament. Paul may very well have reckoned Stephens death a landmark. Finally, on this point, to whom does Luke owe the story of the vision dying Stephen saw? Who of the bystanders would tell it to Luke? Paul seems as likely to have heard Stephens last words for himself as to have learnt them from Luke. The dying man, face to face with death, eternity and judgment to come—the things that made Paul, as well as Felix, tremble,—said he saw in an opened heaven the glory of god and Jesus standing on the right hand of god; and in converse (as it appeared) with Jesus, expecting to be with him in a moment and forgiving the men who were killing him, Stephen died, happy. Life often teaches men to be suspicious, or at least cautious; and Paul must have turned all this over in his mind a great many times. He cannot always have found it quite easy to convince himself that the men who threw the stones, the mob who would have stolen the clothes, were right in gods sight; or that Stephen was acting a part and was lying with his last breath. Stephen had been no trimmer in life; and he appeared to be candid in death. His face was not the face of a liar—it was more like an angel (Acts 6:15). If so, then what did he see? Was it possible that Jesus still lived, as the Christians said? Paul had not our modern psychology, which, modern as it is for the present, has perhaps not solved all the problems. He was confronted with a dilemma; either Stephen lied to the last, or else—or else there might be something in the Christian story of the risen Jesus; and, if he dismissed the second alternative, the former was not very easy either. We can imagine him perplexed in the extreme—growingly angry with himself and as a result more violent, as if to force himself away from distasteful hypotheses or doubts, and more savage with his work of persecution. Ego fiebam miserior et tu propinquior, wrote Augustine of a similar interval in his own experience—I grew more miserable, and thou nearer; thy right hand was even then to catch me out of the mire and to wash me, and I knew it not; and he too speaks of the fear of death and judgment, which never left him through all his changes of opinion. Paul took refuge in action, as men do; but even action has its interludes, one cannot be active every moment—least of all a man of his swiftness of mind, and suddenness of thought. Action in his case, when it meant widespread arrests and a journey to Damascus, involved associates. We can guess what these associates were—how little congenial to the troubled man in charge of them, and how ill they showed in contrast with their victims. Every arrest repeated the reminder of the dying Stephen and the men who killed him. So the Damascus gate is reached. Here, if it seem that we have been using conjecture already, more conjecture awaits us, and happily a new area of clearness and certainty beyond it. There has been, as there was bound to be, a great deal of discussion as to what happened at the gate of Damascus. Professor Percy Gardner, for instance, says that there is no excuse for taking the Lucan account for sober history; that Luke has a love for the marvellous, and the bright light, the vision and the words may be due to him; and that the three narratives differ in essential points. Professor B. W. Bacon holds that the discrepancies, which Luke might perfectly well have removed, if he had cared to take the trouble, prove the uncritical popular character of the story. It can, however, hardly be maintained, by any real student of Luke, that Luke invented the whole episode, the light, the words, and the vision; whatever he does with them in his narrative, it seems incredible that he is not drawing upon Pauls own account of something that happened. But the discrepancies are surely not central, or essential. How much did the companions hear or see? is not a question of prime importance. If Paul, or Luke, fluctuated on this point, it should be remembered that affidavits sworn to by the companions would probably have varied a good deal, or, if they had all agreed, would have been no better evidence. In any case, what the companions may have supposed to have happened, matters to nobody. If it is said that Luke ought to have made all his narratives tally to the last detail, history is not written by lawyers nor logicians, nor perhaps any other literature that lives. As to what we are told that Paul saw, heard and said, the agreement is substantial, though in addressing Agrippa Paul rather telescopes his narrative, as he did the story of the Antioch disagreement when he wrote to the Galatians. To-day psychologists will group this episode with similar or apparently similar ones in the experience of other men; and it is not unreasonable. I believe that in such cases the words are generally few and are indelible from the memory. That Paul saw or seemed to see a great light, shining all round himself and his companions, and that he fell, will strike no one as odd to-day; and it fits in exactly that he should uniformly give the words alike, and that they are direct and few. Any one who has had any experience of the receipt of words, whatever his theory about their origination, will know how clear and definite they are, and will be able to give them long after, and frequently to add the exact spot at which they were given or came. Paul also saw—and not infrequently, as his own writings and Luke both tell us. The first remark to be made may be given in Weinels words: The particular form, which Pauls conversion assumed, was surely caused quite as much by the strange psychology which was then universally accepted, as by the picture of Christ taken over from Judaism. a modern man, not unfamiliar with the psychology of to-day, might see the same figure and hear like words, and yet not suppose that what he saw was objective nor that what he heard was audible to another, and still might realize that it was a critical moment, which would be decisive for him. It is put in this way to-day. So many things are working within him, as we have seen, and in conflict; and with a flash—it is odd how spontaneous English phrase hits off a co-incidence—comes a light, and at any rate one problem is solved. Suppose (it is said) that the sufferings of Jesus, his rejection and death, are, as Stephen said, exactly along the line of the true prophets, and, so far from discrediting the Messiah, prove his true succession and authenticate him? and again, if Israel claimed or expected some acceptance with god, or some consideration from god, in virtue of the merits of the patriarchs (as we saw), can the sufferings of Jesus serve the same end, and, instead of being the final proof of gods damnation of him, mean a new footing for men in approaching God? now both these ideas require development and definition—tasks on which Paul and others have spent their lives; but their sudden realization may go far to explain what happened at the Damascus gate. I think it is reasonably maintained that visions, in or out of the mystical state, and words received (and other experiences, whatever they may be, that fall into this class) have their form and content from what is already working consciously or subconsciously within the mans mind who has the experience. It comes, then, briefly to this: are we to say that the line of thought, culminating suddenly in a new clarity, produces the vision, or that the vision leads to the clarification of the thought? Probably many psychologists to-day, professed and amateur, would prefer to say the former; Paul said the latter. There is this to be said for the modern view, that different minds reach conviction in different ways—slowly or quickly putting things together, and gaining a new view as the result, but figuring the process to themselves in different terms, putting it in different language, and sometimes associating the change with some experience or sensation which may be novel. Platos old quarrel between poetry and philosophy is not unconnected with these differences. Reason and intuition and instinct are terms used to express the routes by which conviction is reached; though it is not clear that they do not imply all exactly the same route travelled over at different rates of speed. When John Bunyan was seized with a new view of things, he might see it, he often did see it, in a mental picture; things fell naturally into picture form for him, as they do for the artist. But Bunyan was also conscious of hearing a voice—at least, as he thought it out, he had the sensation (as we put it) of hearing it: It would sound so loud within me, yea, and, as it were, call so strongly after me, that once, above all the rest, I turned my head over my shoulder, thinking verily that some man had, behind me, called me. The daimonion, the vague rather supernatural thing, of which Socrates spoke —the warning he used to get somehow—is another illustration of my point. It is arguable that Paul visualized his profoundest experiences—saw when he felt most deeply—saw or heard (or both) when a premonition (which also is a vague word) reached him, or when a course (as in travel ) became clear to him, or, as at the damascus gate, when a new idea or adjustment of ideas swept without warning into his mind. At the same time our warrant for excluding the possibility of a risen Jesus of his own choice showing himself to Paul, as the disciples said he did to them, cannot be unimpeachable. However difficult it be to prove it, we have no moral right, or intellectual right, to rule out that alternative. It was so that Paul always interpreted this experience, though others of the kind he referred to the angel of the Lord. Angels and spirits are indeed constantly reported as seen by persons of a lower culture than that to which we aspire; but again we have no right perhaps to dogmatize on what may be possible to persons who have gone further than we have. But after all whether the word or vision be (to use hackneyed terms of to-day, not quite scientific but useful) objective or subjective in its origin, that is not the most important point. Does the idea conveyed, or, if we prefer it, the thought grasped, the issue realized, correspond to the real? does it take us further into the interpretation of all our experience, or does it side-track us and land us in some impossible contradiction? Paul checked his revelation by the rest of his reflective and emotional life, rationalized it, and found in fact that it was no odd or stray addition to his outfit, but a key that unlocked for him the meaning of his own experience, the meaning of Israels history—patriarchs, prophets, and psalmists, and the purposes of god for the whole of mankind. It pleased god, who separated me from my mothers womb and called me by his grace, to reveal his son in me ; so says Paul to the Galatians (i. 15, 16). If, with some historians, we say that this is all that can be said as to his conversion, and decide to suspend judgment on Lukes data, Pauls statement here is enough. He knew at once that a great change of life was before him; and, if Luke had not told us, we could have guessed that he would ask, Lord, what wilt thou have me to do? He continues, to the Galatians: Immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood, and he explains that when, later on, fourteen years after, he talked things over with those who seemed to be pillars, those who seemed to be somewhat had nothing additional to give him, ἀλλὰ τοὐναντίον—but contrariwise. To this revelation of the living Jesus Paul constantly returned. The conviction, reached then for ever, that Jesus lives, became the most effectual and operative force in his own life. He habitually conceives of Christ as clothed in the δόξα or Divine radiance in which he first beheld him at Damascus, and the experience was confirmed by a lifetime. It could not, one feels rightly or wrongly, have been so momentous, if it had not been led up to in some such way as we have supposed. A decisive experience must properly decide something; and, if there was nothing that needed to be decided and was decided, the intensity of Pauls feeling has very little meaning. The great epoch-making conversions, however sudden some of them may seem, have generally not been unheralded. To the men whom Paul brought to Damascus, to the authorities who sent them, and (as we learn) to the Christians, Pauls conversion was a bolt from a blue sky; but he knew the prelude of storm as they did not. It will be well to survey the points that were decided. First of all, Jesus lived; the resurrection story, Paul now saw, was true. God had shown him His son; no experience could be more wonderful, more definitive. The whole of Pauls subsequent thought is based on the truth of the resurrection, on Christ working in the power of an infinite life, a working whereby he is able to subdue all things unto himself — declared to be the son of god with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead. Jesus from that moment is for Paul a divine being, and the identity is patent of the historical Jesus and the risen Christ. It will not be out of the way to recall here the vision of the dying Stephen—it is the same that Paul sees, and the coincidence (if the word may be used without its suggestion of accident) is significant. The psychologist may hold that the one has suggested the other; every vision, every mystical experience, it may be held, has its starting-point in something without. But, however we may explain it or phrase it, the connexion is surely not a chance one. In the next place, the Cross is explained, and it wins the central place, which it kept in Pauls thinking. Christianity for Paul consists, first and last, of experiences generated in the believer by the Cross. It is no longer a stumblingblock, as Paul says it remained to the Jews, who missed its meaning; he holds its meaning, and it becomes for him the criterion by which everything in heaven and earth and history is judged. The suffering of Christ, a scandal to the gentile philosopher as well as to the Jew, becomes the very thing that makes him Christ, the proof of his messiahship, the revelation of his nature, and his real and eternal glory. It is the pledge of a love on gods part that no one could have dreamed, nor, without the Cross, believed. In the third place, the whole difficult problem of righteousness, of Sin and Forgiveness, is solved. The Cross is reconciliation, and we have peace with god. to this tortured man, haunted with the sense of failure, anxious about gods judgment, and convicted already, there was new life in the revelation that god loved him to the point of giving His son for him—God commendeth his love toward us in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Hereafter, terror is not among the emotions roused by the thought of god in the mind of Paul; it is the love of god that absorbs him and surprises him, and (as a critic has said) disorganizes his grammar—a love too great to get into words and sentences, a love that produces aphasia—as the epistle of Peter puts it, joy unspeakable and glorified. this new conviction has the power to break the bonds of old habits, old prejudices, and old preconceptions, and to lead Paul on to new life—new with a newness that never grows stale and with the freshness of perpetual revelation. Wonder, according to Aristotle, is the source of philosophy; and Pauls undying wonder makes his theology. The problem of Israel is solved too. God is not rejecting Israel; but the choice of Israel proves to be a better thing than Israel supposed, it is not an end in itself, but a means to a higher and more wonderful end. It was not that Israel is chosen and theres an end of it; not at all, to Israel is foreshown, and with Israel is shared, Gods larger purpose for mankind. The oracles of god are given to Israel for the world, and not for Israel alone. In the matter of the law Paul seems to have moved some distance. At first he appears to have held a Jewish view that it was given by angels. His later epistles suggest that he was occupied with other themes, when once in Romans he had worked out his ideas upon the Law—greater themes, the place and work of Christ in all time and all existence. But in any case the law was never going to be gods last word; or why should He have sent His son? Paul never loses his attachment to his people; he hopes against hope that their acceptance of Christ will come in time, and prove life from the dead —the consummation of the world and the resurrection itself. Lastly, the difficulty about the Gentiles is dissolved into thin air. All his early friendships and interests were right after all; Gamaliels interest in greek literature was right; the theory, that had given Paul so much pain, was all a mistake; god loved the gentile as He did the Jew, and Paul could find room for his own heart to expand in gods world of men. So much was clear at once, but the full value of it Paul was not to discover except with time. Many things had to be re-thought; and even the points mentioned are probably clearer and sharper-edged in our summary, with the rest of Pauls life and his epistles before us, than they were at the moment to him. How he developed is plain to any one who will read his epistles in chronological order, how profoundly and how swiftly—and, not improbably, with an increasing rate of acceleration. It has been conjectured that the interval in Arabia, which he mentions to the Galatians, was largely given to reflexion, but that must remain a guess. By the time he wrote to the Galatians, his account of the great change in his life is drawn with edges sharp and clear enough. That is no uncommon phenomenon. Augustines Confessions describe a conversion completer and more abrupt than could be surmised from his writings of the period, and the question has been raised as to which give the truer picture —not a very profound question. To the man looking back it is plain how great the change was, and that it was final and decisive; to the man at the time its full meaning was not so evident, and (as we should expect of men like Augustine and Paul) he will not say more than he has realized, he will say probably a good deal less than he might—naturally and wisely. I were but little happy, if I could say how much, and a man of any depth will often impress onlookers as taking great happiness or great changes, which may come suddenly, with a surprising coolness. Jesus himself hints something of the kind in his parable of the seed and the soils; the seed in the good ground shows less for a while than the seed in the shallow earth, but no one in the long run can doubt that it was really sown. The great change comes in Augustine, and he is quieter about it than some readers of the Confessions would have expected; but he knew, and Paul knew, that it was a decisive moment; how much in life was changed neither could at once know. - via WORDsearch10 #readingsforsuchatimeasthis #christjesus #theword #studyscripture #god #biblestudy #bible #jesus #faith #holyspirit #vineofchristministries
Posted on: Thu, 18 Dec 2014 21:54:10 +0000
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