Taking the Epistle: Wrapping up Paul

Wrapping up the series of posts I did about the letters attributed to St Paul in the New Testament, I'm going to try to sum up the general themes that I found as I went along. here's a list of links to the relevant posts:

Romans
1 Corinthians
2 Corinthians and Galatians
Ephesians
Philippians
Colossians
1 & 2 Thessalonians
1 & 2 Timothy and Titus (The Pastoral Letters)
Philemon

Firstly, Paul was a natural authoritarian. For all he had a really quite hippie-ish message to spread, he seems very much to have been someone who respected authority, who saw law and order as the natural way to go. Given that he was simultaneously teaching that the Law of Moses was no longer applicable, he must have had a real conflict of character even as he so fiercely and firmly defended his view.

In place of the Law, Paul raises instead the "fruits of the Spirit", the characteristics that he felt marked a 'good' Christian out from the non-believers. Perhaps it is unsurprising that Paul highlights characteristics that make for orderly behaviour! They do happen to be the characteristics that are highlighted in Jesus' teachings, though:

• love
• joy
• peace
• patience
• kindness
• goodness
• faithfulness
• gentleness
• self-control
• forgiveness
• truthfulness/honesty
• humility

Paul also (in the same authoritarian fashion) frowns on things that seem disorderly. In addition to things that are directly against the above, he adds such things as gossip, drunkenness, crude humour or language, orgies etc. Indeed, self-control seems to be his biggest ideal! In 1 Corinthians, his ideal of worship is a very calm, sedate ministry, everyone waiting calmly to take their turn to speak and praise the Lord.

Paul draws a very clear distinction between the physical and the spiritual, and appears to cast them as necessarily antagonistic towards one another: in order for the spiritual to flourish, we must exert self-control over our bodies. His teachings on sexuality in particular seem to be based in this idea. Thus, the seeking of sexual pleasure for its own sake is something upon which Paul frowns, and instead he wishes that those who feel such desires should find some other slutty person to marry ASAP so they can at least get on with it in wedlock instead of corrupting everybody else! (1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy) I suspect that at least one reason why Paul is anti-gay is that he buys into the belief, still common today, that homosexuality is purely about sexual gratification and that there is no spiritual element to a same-sex relationship. In the sense that "one cannot ascribe nonsense to God", the fact that it seems there really are spiritually committed gay relationships in the world says that Paul is wrong on this one - it is possible to be gay and not "sexually immoral".

A recent programme on Channel 4 ("The Bible: A History") had an episode looking at the teachings of St Paul and raised the question that some of the hierarchical teachings that denigrated the position of women may have been inserted at a later date. I'm not convinced about this, at least in all the cases. For instance, I think the passage from Ephesians is very characteristic of Paul's mentality and approach as he appears in the other letters (including the 7 undisputed ones). While Acts and several of the Letters reveal that there were several prominent women in positions of power in the early Church, Paul does seem to have clung to some of his hierarchical beliefs in terms of gender relations.

But (as I pointed out when discussing Ephesians) I think part of this is a logic fail by Paul: he uses first the analogy of Christ wedded to the Church, to illustrate something about the nature of the relationship - but then he seems to suggest that because there is this parallel, that we should then make the marriage resemble as closely as possible the relationship of Christ to the Church - as Christ is to the Church, so the man is to the woman. However it may have been (and bearing in mind the economic realities for women in former times) the reversal "so we should aim to make it more like that!" is obviously nonsense, but it is easy to see how Paul's authoritarian love of orderliness might have wanted it to be so.

In general, though, Paul preaches the equality of all humans - there is implicit denunciation of racism and of sexism (regardless of his own sexist beliefs!) Paul could be argued as one of the earliest teachers that all human beings are born free and equal. Paul expresses it as "equal before God", of course. Indeed, Paul has to take that line or be a hypocrite. Arguing against the Gnostic sects who said that there was a special secret knowledge or initiation needed before one could enter Heaven, for Paul then to have said that equal and true access to Christ was limited to a particular class of people would have been utterly absurd - and so he doesn't make any such case. According to Paul, all humans are capable of salvation, and all people before God are equal - all believers can count themselves as being spiritually "Abraham's seed" and therefore without distinction between them.

This leaves the big question: as mentioned above, Paul taught that adherence to the Mosaic Law was no longer necessary - that the fruits of the Spirit gave rise naturally to the aims and objects of that law, and that the Law was always intended to guide the people in living up to those objectives. Rhetorically, he asked the Galatians, "Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law, or by believing what you heard?" According to Paul, the Mosaic Law may give direction but it cannot lead us all the way to understanding and salvation - and once we have that understanding, we no longer are in need of guidance: we are no longer children in the spirit but full adults in the Spirit. This is the essence of what Paul teaches, and why the old law no longer applies.

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Next up, there's the unattributed letter to the Hebrews.