Introducing Paul

The Man, His Mission and His Message

Michael F. Bird

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780830898336
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Studi biblici

Many Christians who know and love the Bible think they know the apostle Paul. He's a theological master, a pastoral mentor, a spiritual adviser and a missionary hero. Yet just when we think we have him in our grasp, he slips through our fingers. At the point where we suppose we have finally understood him, Paul again confounds us. But he also beckons us to explore God's ways more deeply.Michael Bird suggests that if the Paul we claim to know looks and sounds a lot like us, it's probably a warning light that we don't know him as well as we think we do. But if we let Paul be Paul, allowing him to speak for himself in his language, on his terms and for his purposes, then we stand a chance of meeting him anew.Introducing Paul is an animated and penetrating survey of Paul's life and teaching. It covers all the basics students need, while offering new insights with a light touch. Blending life and study, Bird aims to get us excited about reading Paul's letters, sharing his gospel and living the Christian life the way he thought it should be lived. For beginning students and laypeople, Introducing Paul is a valuable entrance into the contemporary study of Paul.

1. WHAT IS PAUL?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul is known best through his epistles, which is where he truly comes alive to us.2 He wrote letters for a variety of reasons: to encourage and rebuke congregations, to exhort individuals in their ministry, to defend his authority and ministry and to establish fellowship with Christians he did not know personally. Paul writes as a substitute for his personal presence and to convey his viewpoint in troubling situations. In divine providence, these letters were written for us, but were not originally written to us. All of Paul’s letters are occasional in that they are written to specific churches or individuals in specific circumstances. At times Paul requests that his letters be read widely and be given to other churches as well (e.g. 1 Thess. 5:27; Col. 4:16), showing he has an eye on the utility and value of his letters for addressing other churches too. Possibly one or two of Paul’s letters, particularly Ephesians, were circular letters and were designed for widespread circulation. Those after Paul who collected his many letters and bound them into one compilation did so because they believed his words were inspired by God and of great relevance to Christians even after Paul’s time. That is unsurprising, since Paul’s letters are simultaneously theological, missional and pastoral. His letters continued to be of relevance to Christians in environs altogether different from those of their original recipients.

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

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

If you want to know what it means to follow Jesus in a world with gay marriages, where military threats loom in the Middle East, where different Jesuses are preached on television, where Christians are denounced for failing to embrace religious diversity, where some Christians even accommodate their faith to post-modernity, where Christians look more like the world than Christ, and where keeping Christians of varied convictions together in worshipful unity is increasingly difficult, then Paul is the author you need to read, since his experience is similar to yours.

If you are sick of spiritual ‘milk’ and crave ‘meat’, if you want to have a faith that is simultaneously thoughtful and pastoral, if you want to know the big picture but don’t want to skimp on the details, then Paul is the author you need to read, for he is the one who most in the New Testament combines pastoral insights with profound theological reflection. A fresh encounter with Paul will leave your assumptions shaken to their foundations, your theological world turned upside down, your spirituality revitalized, your faith quickened, your love for God and Christ renewed, and your labour in the kingdom refocused. This is Paul for the people of God.

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

Persecutor

At one point in Galatians, Paul recounts elements of his life prior to his conversion and reports, ‘You have heard of my former way of life in Judaism. How intensely I was persecuting the church of God and was trying to destroy it’ (Gal. 1:13). In Philippians, he states that the extent of his zeal in Judaism went as far as being ‘a persecutor of the church’ (Phil. 3:6). Paul considers himself the least of all the apostles because he previously persecuted the church (1 Cor. 15:9). He was once a militant Pharisee (Phil. 3:5; Acts 23:6; 26:5) and was committed to the law of Moses, to the purity of Israel and to an apocalyptic world view where the salvation of the present evil age would come directly from God. In Acts, Paul (or Saul as he was then known) was party to the public stoning of Stephen by an angry mob (Acts 7:58; 8:1) and ‘voted’ for the death of other Messiah followers (Acts 26:10).

Afterwards, Saul was ‘ravaging the church, and entering house after house, he delivered over men and women and he put them in prison’ (Acts 8:3). His determination to eradicate this deviant sect from the landscape led him even to go to the high priest and ask ‘for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any who belonged to the Way, men or women, he might bind them and bring them to Jerusalem’ (Acts 9:1—2). Saul of Tarsus, the cosmopolitan Jew learned in Greek and trained in Pharisaic lore, was pious in his religious faith and zealous in his commitment to protect Israel from apostasy and impurity. He was thoroughly devoted to the traditions of the fathers as the way of righteousness for the nation. Like many religious men of his day and ours, Saul believed his actions were in the name of God and were for the good of others. So it is true that the most heinous acts of violence are not committed by men who believe that what they do is malevolent, but rather are done by those who believe that what they do is righteous.

Given Saul’s lust for the destruction of the disciples, his relentless persecution of believers and his willingness to travel to regions beyond Judea to seize followers of Jesus, it is no wonder that reports of his conversion were met with suspicion (Acts 9:26—27). When the genuineness of Paul’s conversion became apparent, it was equally unsurprising that, as he narrates, the churches of Judea ‘glorified God because of me’ (Gal. 1:24). And what glory Paul brought to Christ as well!

We shall look at Paul’s conversion and call later. Suffice it to say that we shall never understand him unless we come to terms with the radical transformation that occurred in his person, which turned him from persecutor into proclaimer. It is this radical revelation of God’s grace that leads Paul to regard his inherited privileges and personal achievements as skybala, or what I translate as ‘human filth’ (Phil. 3:8). It is human filth compared to Christ, in whom Paul says he has gained a better righteousness than that under the law, and through Christ alone he hopes to attain the resurrection from the dead (Phil. 3:6—11). In his letters, Paul often contrasts the current life and status of Christians in Christ with their former way of life and status apart from Christ (e.g. 1 Cor. 1:26—31; 6:9—11; 12:2; Gal. 4:8—9; Eph. 2:1—3; Col. 1:21; 3:7). Paul applies that to himself as well, as is evident from Galatians 1 and Philippians 3. Elsewhere in the Pastoral Epistles we read, ‘But I was shown mercy so that in me, the quintessential sinner, Christ Jesus might display his unlimited patience as an example for those who would believe on him and receive eternal life’ (1 Tim. 1:16). It was grace as an event, not merely a doctrine, that made this sinner and persecutor of the body of Christ a ‘herald and an apostle’ (1 Tim. 2:7).

Missionary

One of the most significant events of the Second World War was Hitler’s decision to switch the focus of the German army from western Europe (and the invasion of Great Britain) to eastern Europe in order to commence the invasion of Russia in 1940. Historians believe it was this decision that cost Hitler the war. Likewise, in the history of Christian missions, one of the most significant turning points was Paul’s decision to shift his attention from the east and to head west. After his conversion, Paul spent his initial years in Damascus and Arabia (Acts 9:20—25; 2 Cor. 11:32—33; Gal. 1:17), which were a natural extension of the environs of Judea, and would most likely lead to places such as the Hellenistic cities of eastern Syria, Armenia, Nisibis, Adiabene, Babylon, Susa, and perhaps even India.3 There were, after all, a large Jewish diaspora (dispersion) and several Hellenistic cities in the east.4

During Paul’s second missionary journey, when he and his companions are in the Phrygian part of Galatia, they attempt to go east into Bithynia, but Luke reports that ‘the Spirit of Jesus did not let them’ (Acts 16:7). Instead of going east, the Pauline mission goes west into Greece. Paul focuses his energies on establishing churches in the major cities of the Aegean coast, including Ephesus, Philippi, Thessalonica and Corinth. His use of main travel routes and major cities may represent a deliberate strategy to spread the Christian faith throughout the Roman Empire.5 In the mid-50s ad, Paul writes to the Romans that ‘from Jerusalem and as far around as Illyricum [modern Albania and the area near it] I have fully proclaimed the gospel of Christ’ (Rom. 15:19). In fact, one of Paul’s reasons for writing to the Romans is to garner their material support for his planned mission to Spain (Rom. 15:24—28). Spain is also known as ‘Tarshish’, and Isaiah 66:19 depicts Tarshish and Greece as the locations where the survivors of Israel’s exile are sent in order to declare God’s glory among the Gentiles. There is, then, some warrant for taking Isaiah 66:19 as providing the geographical framework for Paul’s mission to take the gospel to the ends of the earth.6

Paul never presents a manifesto for mission, but the purpose of his apostolic call can be discerned in several of his passing remarks (1 Cor. 1:17; 9:19—23; 2 Cor. 5:11, 18—21; Rom. 1:5; 15:15—20; 16:26; Col. 1:28—29; Eph. 3:7—11; 6:19—20). In Romans, this is spelled out as bringing Genti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1 What is Paul?
• 2 A funny thing happened on the road to Damascus
• 3 The stories behind the story
• 4 Reading someone else’s mail
• 5 The royal announcement
• 6 The crux of the gospel
• 7 The return of the King
• 8 One God, one Lord: monotheism and the Messiah
• 9 Living a life worthy of the gospel: the ethics of Paul
• 10 Gospelizing 101: Paul’s spirituality
• 11 Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Biblical References
• Index of Ancient Sources
• Notes
• Praise for Introducing Paul
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright