The writings of the Apostle Paul are not ordinary writings. They are not thought-out rhetorical compositions with a logical form, but they are intimate letters, felt, not thought. They call from the innermost depths of one human being to others of his kind,—a call to their innermost depths. But that is not all. With the Apostle Paul this appeal is not an appeal looking merely to the comfort, well-being or salvation of the race. Paul's aim was not the ease of the human race but its proper functioning. Primarily, he had in mind the need of the universe. He thought and spoke of all creation travailing for lack of something,—the scheme of God going awry because we do not perform our function. His call to us, then, is not primarily a call to salvation, but to a post of danger, a post of desperate responsibility. He calls us to be, in his words, "co-workers with God." It is a terrible thing to take this post, not because it is not infinite bliss, but because it means admitting to ourselves the valuelessness of all that we have prided ourselves on, all that we have held dear in this planetary life. Paul uses very emphatic language in this connction. He says, "I count all these things but dung." He says that our function is to die with Christ.
Of course this does not mean asceticism or "giving up" in the ordinary sense, but the shifting of values from the temporal to the eternal, from the phenomenal to the real. In short, Paul's letter to the Romans, which I have selected for special consideration because it contains substantially all his message, is not just a formulation of his beliefs or theological position, but it is a desperate attempt, with all too inadequate words, to put us in direct experiential contact with a living truth which he has experienced.
This truth as I shall try to show, is not merely a thing of words, a formulation, an inert mass, but it is a radio-active organism. It means death or life. "There is no safe dallying with Truth." Either the hearer catches fire,—and it is no mean responsibility to cause that,—or, he encysts, adds just one more layer of verbalization to insulate him forever from reality. "Words are more dangerous than armies. They put the mind to sleep," says Lao Tze. If you wish a quotation nearer home, hear the Quaker Isaac Penington: "Out of words that come from life," he says, "man gathers death."
Paul has been misunderstood. The Epistle to the Romans has been called the Gospel according to St. Paul. If by that phrase it is meant that in this epistle the Apostle Paul has tried to confine in words the truth which Jesus lived, then the phrase is wrong. But this misunderstanding can be corrected. It is worse, however, that Paul has been un-understood. We take his words as intellectual formulations. Many people find them formulations of a particularly trying kind. They never realize that these words were not intended by Paul to have value in themselves. They are with him merely signposts to reality.
The true Gospel of St. Paul is not his written words, but it is to be found in the reality of the experience behind the words. "Ye are my letters," said St. Paul. And if we are not to blind ourselves to the whole purpose of Paul, we must not think that he made that statement idly or rhetorically.
I feel also that there is a special difficulty in presenting the Apostle Paul to Friends or, for that matter, to any who are "socially minded," for the reason that he did not participate, at least in any primary way, in the activities which constitute a large part of our overt behavior. I will not say he had no interest in these activities but he was primarily interested in what he called "a new creation" or a "new creature," rather than in what we may call "social betterment." If there were not this fundamental transformation, or the possibioity of it, then he could not interest himself vitally as a social or economic reformer. He was not an abolitionist. He advised Timothy to take a little wine. He was not a pacifist. He told the soldiers to be good soldiers, and continually represented the Christian life as warfare. At the same time, to appreciate his position, I cannot conceive that the Apostle Paul would have ever taken up the trade of soldiering. Paul was not a feminist. He said that a husband is the head of his wife, and a good many things that feminists will consider worse than that. I might say incidentally on behalf of Paul that I do not feel that he was giving an unworthy view of the relation between man and woman when he could think of no lesser analogy than the relationship between Christ and His Church.
All these are particular instances which occur to the mind; but we can say generally that Paul never engaged actively in any form of social or economic betterment, unless we wish to except his attempt in his younger days to rid society of the cancer of the Christian Church.
In spite, however, of this apparent difference in viewpoint, I venture to proceed, because I feel that Paul was not in principle antagonistic to all these things, or even that he was uninterested. He simply felt that there was something else that came first, without which all of these attempts at betterment were futile. His activities, in view of his experience, were with that primary fundamental something. At worst, he was like the rather unfeeling physician who disregards the patient's discomfort in the intensity of his anxiety to get at the primary cause of the disease. Paul had experienced the desperate essntial need of mankind, and of the universe. No palliative could satisfy him.
Do not misunderstand me. I do not take this position merely, and allow Paul standing by sufferance only. As for myself, I believe that Paul's position is just the same as the Quaker position, in that religion to him, was direct experiential contact with God, beneath and independent of any forms, formulations, beliefs, dogmas, or course of conduct whatsoever. Those things were secondary and had to come out of that underlying experience, if they were to have any meaning at all. But at the same time, that experiential contact, to Paul, was no mere mystical question. It was an active thing. Through contact with the divine love, he became directly and importunately aware of his relationship to all mankind, to that universe of whose groans he tells us so vividly. To Paul, his "blood" relationship to Christ—and by that he means something very intimate and fundamental—necessarily involved the same relationship to the body of Christ. He saw his fellow-man not from any humanitarian standpoint but, to use his expressive phrase, as "the brother for whom Christ dies," that is, as a functioning element in the divine plan. He might not feel it incumbent upon him to attempt to inculcate in that brother what he conceived to be correct ideas as to meat easting, for instance, but if it made that brother to offend, he would eat no meat while the world stood.
Here is a man who is worth investigating. If we are unwilling to call him extraordinary or enigmatic, at least he is not usual. I now purpose to attempt to reach to him through his writings. This is going to take us back first to the Renaissance, and I hope that we can approach the subject in the spirit of impartial inquiry characteristic of that period.