Paul: a lover of Jesus Christ
At the beginning of the year dedicated to St Paul Peter Mullen celebrates the tender and irascible apostle
27 June 2008

Painting of St Paul by El Greco

We are just coming to the start of the Year of St Paul proclaimed last June by the Holy Father. If anyone deserved a year to be dedicated to him, it is St Paul, the greatest Christian missionary. Not that he needs an honour, as if he were a minor celeb hoping to receive a gong in the New Year List. Rather, the splendid idea of dedicating a year to the Apostle is to encourage us to pay more attention to his writings in the New Testament.

"Jesus preached a simple, moral faith - do as you would be done by - and then along came St Paul to mystify it and so hijack the down-to-earth teachings of Christ and saddle every succeeding Christian generation with insoluble problems and difficulties."

I first heard that protest from a close friend who was our organist when I was a country parson. Tim had been a chorister at Windsor under Walford Davies in the 1920s and progressed to become Master of the Music in one of the great English cathedrals. He told me he had spent all his life at the console listening to readings from the Bible and all he had learnt from St Paul was that the faith is so abstruse that no ordinary person could hope to understand it.

I have some sympathy with this, for undeniably St Paul does have his mystical moments when he rhapsodises about the cosmic Christ and speaks of his own highly charged mystical raptures and of not knowing whether he was in the body or out of it, caught up into the third heaven. But against this, he also speaks profoundly and plainly on the most difficult spiritual, matters. Take Original Sin for example. This is a murky and misunderstood area if ever there was one. To grasp it you can't do better than go back to St Paul: "The thing I would not, that I do; and what I would, I do not." There you have our whole psychological-spiritual predicament in words of one syllable.

We have to get away from the idea that religious and theological doctrines are simple. Of course there is often an immediate sense which we can take from some of the sayings of Jesus, but the first understanding is only scratching at the surface. The Lord's Prayer, for instance, may seem to wear its meaning on its face, but give to it a lifetime of study and you will still not reveal all it contains. Spiritual language is profound and inexhaustible. If it were not, it would be no more than a catalogue of simplistic clichés.



The epistles of St Paul were written earlier than the gospels, so if the accusation of needlessly overcomplicating matters is to stick, it would have a better chance if we made the same accusation of the gospel writers. Of course biblical critics have been telling us for over a century that the Gospel of Christ had already been complicated - by St Paul, who else! - before the gospels were ever written. But I don't buy this. I don't think that all Our Lord's utterances in the gospels were later additions, put into his mouth by the gospel-writers.

Even if you accept the general principles of modern criticism, you cannot read the gospels without coming across a very real person - a character, as we would say if we were discussing a novel. Jesus says things which are characteristic of him, but what he says is rarely simple. "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's." This was Our Lord's sublimely mischievous answer to his opponents. It is a one-line put-down - but notice, he doesn't spell out what the things of Caesar actually are or what are the things of God.

Unless you are prepared to disallow the authenticity of all Christ's words in the gospels - and not even the modern critics go that far - you have to face the fact that he sometimes spoke words which are every bit as mystical as anything from St Paul. Take away the Last Supper and there is not much left of the Gospel. And yet here Jesus says - and this is in all four gospels - "This is my Body... this is my Blood." Those words are by no means instantly accessible and their meaning is not exhausted by a first reading.

Here it is important to make the point - so brilliantly developed by Newman - that doctrine, by its nature, develops. We are not given its whole meaning from the first. Scripture is inspired utterance, divine poetry, and not the motorcycle manual. As George Eliot said: "We must not lapse from the picture to the diagram." We do not have the whole truth delivered to us on a plate: rather we are promised that the Holy Spirit will lead us into all truth. There is no contradiction between the gospels and St Paul. Each of these texts is a personal insight into the one whole Gospel.

The distinct contribution of St Paul is the saving power of faith. But in St Paul faith is not just a logical device in a scheme of salvation which, in the hands of literalistic preachers, seems to have more to do with accountancy than divinity. For St Paul, faith is an overwhelming intellectual and spiritual reality. It is also a profound emotional apprehension, calling to mind Pascal's ecstatic words: "The heart has its reasons which reason knows not of." Which is not to say that Paul is an irrationalist. He does that supreme thing: he embodies reason in deep feeling, in what is heartfelt. Thus his theology is a wonderful reflection of the Incarnation.

For instance: "What shall we say then to these things? If God be for us, who can be against us? He that spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?...

"For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities nor powers. Not things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus Our Lord."

Words that have carried me through many a bad night.

Picking our bits from St Paul is rewarding but it is a bit like Your Hundred Best Tunes - all the warhorses and musical lollipops but by no means the whole of the repertoire. But what makes him so wonderful is that his inspired cadences, conveyed by an unsurpassed poetic intensity, present us with an experience, a reality, that is indubitable: "For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face; now I know in part; but then shall I know even as I am known."

If I were to be left with only one passage from St Paul it would be his magisterial justification of the Resurrection - the whole of 1 Corinthians 15. A sustained theological argument conducted in the highest reaches of poetic speech. It reminds me of Beethoven at his most passionate: "Behold I show you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump. For the trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised incorruptible and we shall be changed..."

I love St Paul. Thank God for him. I love his passion, his intelligence, his irascibility and his tenderness. Most of all I love him for the unmatchable way in which he conveys his own love for Jesus Christ.