He recognized that he had been chosen by God even “while breathing murderous threats” (Acts 9:1), and that the God who chose him was a crucified God and not an “Omnipotent” or an “Almighty” God. In fact, Paul only uses the word “Almighty” for God once (2 Corinthians 6:18), and then he is quoting the Hebrew Scriptures. This is quite significant considering his tradition and training. Paul’s image of God was instead someone crucified outside the city walls in the way a slave might be killed, and not of a God appearing on heavenly clouds. Christ was not the strong, powerful, military Messiah that the Jews had been waiting for throughout their history. He was in fact quite the opposite. This was Jesus’ great revelation, surprise, and a scandal that we have still not comprehended. God is not what we thought God could or should be!.. Only vulnerability allows all change, growth, and transformation to happen–even in God.Paul, like few others, read his own tradition honestly and recognized that Yahweh consistently chose the weak to confound the strong (1 Corinthians 1:17-31)... Only later does Paul have the courage to confront Peter and James in Jerusalem (Galatians 1:16-21), and then a full fourteen years later he tells Peter “to his face” that Peter is wrong (2:11) for imposing non-essentials on people that only give them an incorrect understanding of their correctness or righteousness. (Apparently Peter, the first Pope, was himself fallible, and he too had to learn how to be wrong to grow up!)
Richard Rohr: Universal, Inherent Dignity
Human rights did not yet exist. Into this corrupt and corrupting empire Paul shouts, “One and the same Spirit was given to us all to drink!” (1 Corinthians 12:13). He utterly levels the playing field: “You, all of you, are sons and daughters of God in Christ Jesus . . . where there is no distinction between male or female, Greek or Jew, slave or free, but all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (see Galatians 3:26-28).
.. Who does not want to be told they are worthy and good? Who does not want their social shame taken away? No longer was the human body a cheap thing, degraded by slavery, or sexual, verbal, and physical abuse. Paul is saying, “You are the very temple of God.” Scholars now believe this is Paul’s supreme and organizing idea. Such an unexpected affirmation of human dignity began to turn the whole Roman Empire around.
.. People who hate Christianity after centuries of shaming moralism must also be honest and admit that feminism most strongly emerged in the Western cultures that were formed by what Rene Girard brilliantly called “the virus of the Gospel.”
Vulnerability–Even in God!
Only vulnerability allows all change, growth, and transformation to happen–even in God.Who would have imagined this?
.. Only later does Paul have the courage to confront Peter and James in Jerusalem (Galatians 1:16-21), and then a full fourteen years later he tells Peter “to his face” that Peter is wrong (2:11) for imposing non-essentials on people that only give them an incorrect understanding of their correctness or righteousness. (Apparently Peter, the first Pope, was himself fallible, and he too had to learn how to be wrong to grow up!)
.. In Paul’s letters, he consistently idealizes not power but powerlessness, not strength but weakness, not success but the cross. It’s as if he’s saying, “I glory when I fail and suffer because now I get to be like Jesus–the naked loser–who turned any notion of God on its head.” Now the losers can win, which is just about everybody.
Who Was Saint Paul?
Everyone knew, as the Acts report, that Timothy’s father was Greek, which evidently meant that he was neither Jewish nor Christian. Jews had to live by the Torah. But as Paul told the Galatians with breathtaking audacity, the law could actually be fulfilled by following a single precept, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” In saying this, he effectively collapsed into one Jesus’s two greatest commandments, to love God and to love your neighbor. According to Matthew, Jesus had said, “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
.. Paul’s authentic utterances in his letters often conflict with one another. At times they advocate Jewish law and Jewish practices, such as circumcision, dietary restrictions, and observance of the Sabbath, and at other times they appear to suggest that the love imposed by Christian universalism should bring Jews and Christians together without distinction.
.. Nietzsche had a very different view of Paul, as a Jew who was “ambitious and importunate” with a mind “as superstitious as it was cunning.” He was a “very unpleasant man” with an “extravagant lust for power,” but wracked by anxiety over how to fulfill the Jewish law. “How he hated it,” wrote Nietzsche. By converting to Christianity Paul succeeded in throwing down the cross of the law “to which he felt himself nailed.”