Dean's Letter

April 2006
From The Very Reverend David Bird, Ph.D., Dean and Rector

A New Understanding of St. Paul

Every Lent I try to practice something I preach and add something positive to my life. Since coming to Trinity, I have tried each Lent to get hold of some aspect of Christian faith which has been baffling me or something which I have not kept up on as well as I believe I should have.

The invitation to speak on St. Paul has been a great opportunity to reread much of his work and to see the enormous change which is coming about in Christianity’s understanding of Paul. For centuries, Paul’s conversion has been seen primarily as the result of personal inner tension. Paul, the super-Jew, if you like, realizes that Judaism offers no means of salvation for him and so he turns from being a fanatical Jew to a great apostle of Christianity. Much modern scholarship, however, would say that the old approach over-emphasizes Paul’s discomfort with aspects of traditional Jewish teaching of his day. His conversion experience is rather a direct call from God to preach the message of Jesus of Nazareth. Both Jesus and Paul were Jews and were thoroughly steeped in their Jewish heritage. They are proclaiming a particular message within the first century Jewish environment of a God who created, loves and sustains us; a God who has given us a way to life enshrined in the Jewish law, of which the Ten Commandments are a prime example; and a God who wills the salvation of the whole world.

This same God, who wills that we should all be saved, encourages us to take upon ourselves a new way of life, grounded in the life, teaching and example of Christ. It is this Christ-like life that will help transform culture and the world around us. Just as Paul was called by God to preach the message of Christ, so we are called to be Christ’s agents in the world. The old prayer book put it beautifully in the post communion prayer at the Holy Communion service, and the words remain in our present Rite I Service: we are to “do all such good works as thou hast prepared for us to walk in.”

Some thirty years ago, it was popular to claim that Jesus taught a simple message of love while Paul moralized at us and gave us moral codes to follow. Again, this was an over-simplification. Scholars of the mid-twentieth century were living in a period of enormous ethical transition. Old values were being questioned and sentences like “if it feels good do it” were becoming increasingly common. Jesus became seen as a leader of the new way of thinking and Paul was pushed into the background. Today we see both of them equally concerned both, to uphold traditional values and to stress the priority of love and justice as central aspects of any ethical system.

Very often Jesus and Paul are presented as distinct thinkers expounding their own particular sets of belief. Nothing is further from the truth. The Anglican bishop, Tom Wright, has stressed a better parallel is to see Jesus as a composer and Paul as a conductor, or Jesus as an architect and Paul as a master builder. Neither the conductor not the master builder reinvents the original creator’s design. Rather they interpret it and make it real.

Paul was the realist who gave order and structure to Christianity. He oversaw the taking of Christianity beyond Judaism and made sure Jesus’ vision that the gospel should be spread to all people and nations became a reality. Paul organized the church and saw that it had manageable structures. He gave guidelines about the kinds of behavior we should expect of Christian leaders. In short, Paul was the executor of Jesus’ vision. He worked out ways to worship, how to organize the church effectively, suggested means of caring for the poor and needy, people similar to those who had been fed at Jesus’ table, and made certain that the central tenets of Christian faith were proclaimed to what he considered the known world.

Paul, like Jesus, was called to do God’s work and he did it with all his might. At different times, Paul was beaten, ship-wrecked, imprisoned, ridiculed and deserted by all but one of his friends, Luke the physician. This is a man worth coming to know better. Certainly he is someone we should give thanks for as we approach Easter, for without him the Christian faith might well have been greatly diminished.

— David

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