Understanding Paul

The Early Christian Worldview of the Letter to the Romans

Stephen Westerholm

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780801027314
• eBook ISBN: 9781441231789
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Two thousand years later, Paul attracts more attention than any other figure from antiquity besides one," writes Stephen Westerholm. Why the fascination with the apostle Paul? Westerholm explains that Paul remains such a compelling figure because he was "a man completely captivated by a particular way of looking at life."

Using the themes of the Epistle to the Romans, Westerholm helps readers understand the major components of Paul's vision of life. He delves into the writings of the Old Testament, explores their influence on Paul, and engages contemporary readers in a thought-provoking reconsideration of their own assumptions about faith, theology, and ethics.

This insightful introduction gives postmodern readers, especially those with little or no biblical background, a necessary big-picture look at Paul's view of reality.

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The Commission and Its Context

Romans 1:1–15

The opening of Romans offers nothing to cheer those who would fain believe that even Paul must, on occasion, have engaged in small talk. At the outset he presents himself as a man under commission, briefly defines his assigned task, then declares that he has long desired to meet his readers in person—for the rather impersonal reason that they, too, fall within the sphere of his mandate. Toward the end of the letter Paul indicates that he is writing in order to discharge apostolic responsibilities among the Romans that circumstances had kept him from fulfilling by other means.[1] In short, the only Paul we encounter in Romans is one acting consciously in what he regarded as his appointed office: that of an “apostle.”

Our interest here is in seeing the world through Paul’s (ever so apostolic) eyes: in grasping something of the way Paul came to view, and convinced others to view, the nature and terms of human existence. But in these opening verses, he provides only a brief summary of what it is that he communicates to others, using terms (“gospel of God,” “Son of God,” “resurrection from the dead”) that we may more conveniently explore when they become central to his argument. What dominates the introduction is not the substance of Paul’s message but the claim that he has been commissioned to promote it. This sense of mission—the sense that he has been given a significant part to play in a drama that is nonetheless much bigger than he is—surfaces constantly in Paul’s writings. We do well to begin, as he begins Romans, with his apostolic self-understanding.

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Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God . . .

Through [Jesus Christ] we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles.

I am a debtor both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish—hence my eagerness to proclaim the gospel to you also who are in Rome.

Romans 1:1, 5, 14–15 NRSV

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A Man under Commission

Unsympathetic readings of Paul tend to characterize him as self-important, authoritarian, opinionated, and intolerant. Paul would have responded with an apostolic huff—and, from his perspective, with good reason. Self-important? What can we expect of a man convinced, first, that he lived at the turning point in the conflict of the ages between good and evil, and, second, that through a role-casting that surprised no one more than himself, he had been entrusted with the task of enlisting the non-Jews of the world on the side of the good. Not all will think the drama credible; none can fault one who found it so for playing his part to the hilt. Authoritarian? In all fairness, we should note that Paul was not as rigid on some issues as he was on most. Even in the latter cases, he justified his firmness with appeals, not to his prerogatives as an apostle, but to reasons that he believed mattered to his readers as well as to himself. We can add that he never exempted himself from any constraint or sacrifice that he imposed on others. That being said, we may agree that Paul showed a singular aptitude for demanding compliance. Yet we should also agree that some jobs require such a facility; and Paul’s own task—as he understood both it and the stakes it involved—must surely be reckoned among them. Opinionated? Intolerant? Again, such captions are flatly contradicted by parts of the evidence. And when Paul was as inflexible as only he could be, he would, in his own mind, have betrayed his commission if he had acted differently. Nor would he have allowed that the matters on which he insisted were his own opinions. At issue, as he saw things, were truths that he had been obliged to accept in the light of his commissioning. Loyalty to an awesome task, for which he would be held awesomely responsible, required him to uphold them. He did so—one must concede—with admirable vigor.

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Nowhere is Paul’s sense that he had been commissioned as an apostle more apparent than in Galatians 1:

Paul an apostle—sent neither by human commission nor from human authorities, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead. . . . I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin; for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. . . . God, who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles.

Galatians 1:1, 11–12, 15–16 NRSV

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The root of the problem that many people today have with Paul is thus not our distaste for his self-importance, authoritarianism, or intolerance. Instead, it is our (perhaps subconscious) penchant for discounting a claim to which we are not inclined to give credence: that the resurrected “Son of God” had commissioned Paul. The contemporary dismissal of this particular claim can be placed in a wider context: the worldview of many people today will not admit of revelation from any supernatural source. Paul’s convictions were not so constricted. If, then, we assume that what makes no sense to us cannot have been meant seriously by Paul, we only betray our own cultural blinders.

That Paul himself was convinced that the resurrected Christ had commissioned him is apparent on several counts: from the redirection of his life that his conviction occasioned (the prudence of the worldly wise could not, in Paul’s day, have prompted the change from foe to champion of the Christian cause); from the energy he devoted to the fulfillment of his commission; from the fervor of the religious convictions Paul held because he believed he had seen God’s “son”; from his loyalty to both commission and convictions in the face of hardship and death. In his own mind, Paul was an authorized representative of Jesus Christ. And he applied himself to his august task with a passion and a single-mindedness so remarkable that his readers have been left in doubt whether the man was even pervious to the charms of small talk.

The Framework of the Commission

The problem remains: How are people today to enter the thought world of someone who was convinced that he had experienced what their own worldview excludes as impossible? This difficulty will occupy us throughout the pages that follow. Still, an initial sketch of a pathway into Paul’s world—filled in with more detail in following chapters—may help us understand how Paul’s commission would be seen from within his own horizons.

Newspapers commonly report that a happy, healthy, vivacious child was kidnapped, abused, murdered. We cannot but wonder, on reading such stories, what kind of world we inhabit. Of the many answers that could be given, I will briefly summarize two as a reminder that the same events are susceptible of different interpretations, then consider a third perspective at somewhat greater length as our entrée into the thought world of Paul.

1. The vibrant, innocent life of a child is rightly valued by humans; we deplore its brutal curtailment. Such incidents reveal the utter indifference of the universe to the values and sensibilities of human beings. The world continues on its chaotic way after, as before, a child’s life is snuffed out. Apart from humans, “all that is” is only a purposeless conglomerate of matter. Value and meaning are exclusively the products of human intelligence, feeling, and will. Yet human possibilities of imposing order on reality are quite limited. Inevitably, cold, indifferent nature wins in the end. We can only affirm—in no one’s hearing but our own—that our efforts have made the interval worthwhile.

2. The child’s life was good, its curtailment evil. Human history represents only one of the battlefields on which eternally opposed, superhuman forces wage their constant struggle: powers of creation and destruction, order and chaos, life and death, goodness and evil.

3. The life of a child is good, a precious gift and cause for celebration. So, each in its own right, is the life of the great horned owl, the bay-breasted wood warbler, the great northern pike, and the yellow damselfish. That there are harlequin tuskfish and shingle-back skinks is good, whether or not humans are aware of their existence. Indeed, all that is, because it is and because it has a part in all-that-is, is good. Humans themselves are but a part of all-that-is, distinctive as each species is distinct, but too obviously related to the rest of creation to imagine that they alone give it meaning or worth. Like many another species, they are born, then sustained in early life by those to whom they owe their birth; they grow in stature and in knowledge; they learn to procure their livelihood; they love and are loved; they couple, reproduce, then care—at great sacrifice to themselves—for the new life with which they have been entrusted. We are but a part of this world. It is not of our design or making, nor are we the source of its goodness. For that we must look to the great Lover of life and beauty, who is eternal and good.

Yet children are murdered in this world. It does not follow that the cosmos is itself without value and indifferent to goodness; only that it has become the scene of much that is evil. The evil is real: neither good (like the life of a child) nor evil (like the murder of a child) exists only in human minds. Evil is that which resists and disrupts what is good. Yet evil is not, like good, eternal. By its very resistant, disruptive nature, evil is parasitic: it cannot exist apart from the good—to which it responds inappropriately. We live neither in a world to which we alone bring value, nor in one in which good and evil are coequal combatants. Our world is essentially and wonderfully good, but profoundly and horribly disturbed by things that ought never, and need never, have occurred.

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For Paul (and other early Christians), our world is essentially and wonderfully good, but profoundly and horribly disturbed by things that ought never, and need never, have occurred.

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All three interpretations (and others could, of course, be cited) provide a framework within which one can understand the murder of a child. They conflict and cannot all be true on any fundamental level (though, in principle, they could all be false).[2] We may be inclined to conclude that, given the plethora of possible interpretations, our attempts to arrive at the truth of such matters are pointless: better to content ourselves with the demands and satisfactions of life immediately before us. But such is an impoverished human existence—and it is not academic arrogance that labels it so. The academic may lament that Kant, Kierkegaard, and Camus are too little read, believing that familiarity with their work can enrich our human experience. But we need not be academics to realize that, without some framework, without some vision of what life is about, we have no explanation for why we do what we do; no resource for distinguishing worthwhile pursuits from others that are trivial; no basis for answering the moral questions of a child; no language for articulating the significance of turning points in our lives; no nonsedative means for coping with tragedy. None of us ever does live without some kind of interpretive framework. But we differ widely in the degree of thoughtfulness with which we live, the consistency with which we approach the various aspects of our lives, the coherence of the framework that—consciously or unconsciously—we find ourselves adopting.

We need some framework; at certain levels, most any framework will serve. But human curiosity, our insatiable capacity to wonder and question, will demand at some point whether the framework that we have adopted is true; whether our pursuits are worthwhile in any forum other than that of our own imaginings; whether we are answering or only pacifying the queries of a child. We can hardly pose such questions of any framework until we have a fair grasp of the framework as a whole and of how things look from within its boundaries. Only then can we ask whether such a way of viewing life is coherent, whether it can do justice to all that we know of human experience, whether it gives value to what we sense must be valued, and so on. These are essential, human questions, but they lie beyond our purview here. Our more limited goal is the preliminary one of finding a basis for understanding a particular vision, widely influential—though now widely forgotten.

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Without some vision of what life is about, we have no resource for distinguishing worthwhile pursuits from ones that are trivial, no basis for answering the moral questions of a child, no nonsedative means for coping with tragedy.

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The Appropriateness of the Commission

Paul’s vision of reality is, of course, one version of the third interpretation sketched above. Such a summary provokes myriads of doubts and queries: How can evil originate in a world supposedly good? How can a God supposedly good permit it to happen? How does one explain the existence, not only of moral evil, but also of natural disasters? These questions all have their place. But our immediate concern in this chapter is how a commission such as Paul believed he had received, though incredible to many people today, made sense to him.

If nonhuman reality has no value of its own, and if the only order it shows is mechanical, then Paul’s commission as he understood it is impossible.[3] But th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Commission and Its Context
• 2. Intuitions of Goodness—and Divine Tzedakah
• 3. War against Goodness
• 4. Israel Joins the Fray
• 5. The Divine Counter
• 6. Faith’s Awakening
• 7. Just Cause for Joy
• 8. Freedom versus Freedom
• 9. The Goals and Goodness of the Law
• 10. At Home in the Cosmos
• 11. The Triumph of God in History
• 12. On Living the Good Life
• Index
• Notes