of the highest and holiest reality the mind can conceive is relevant to all time.
By way of critique, however, Günter Bornkamm took exception with much of the above. In his book entitled Paul, Bornkamm rejected any attempts to assess Paul’s Christ Jesus as a “concept of God” or the “idea of God” imposed upon the figure of Jesus.14 We have noted that Albert Schweitzer rejected the same temptation, observing that any direct appropriation of the divine was foreign to Paul’s thought and could only be achieved through a Mediator. Bornkamm’s work, however, was generated in the late 1960s as a culmination of the quest for the historical Jesus in Bornkamm’s day. Since Bornkamm’s period, the latest quest of the historical Jesus—as represented in the works of the Jesus Society and the scholars of the Five Gospels, the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library as well as the Qumran scrolls, and in Crossan’s probing analyses of Jesus as sage and revolutionary—has brought new “evidence” to light in the role that gnostic, Platonic, and Roman imperialism played in shaping Christianity’s first-century views. Factors other than eschatology, on which Schweitzer launched his Pauline masterpiece, were at play. To these factors we must return, but there are philosophical considerations of Paul’s identity with Christ that deserve review and can enrich our personal search for fulfillment.
It is Søren Kierkegaard who, in modern times, has forced theologians to ponder the problems and possibilities raised by any “self’s” relationship with the divine. These problems and possibilities have to do with Kierkegaard’s analysis of the self’s relationship with itself and of that self’s relationship, in turn, to God. In both Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death, he restates the problem in numerous ways. Both essays represent the Dane’s reflections on God’s call to Abraham to offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice to God. It involves a philosophical dalliance, even a teleological suspension of the ethical, between the “universal and the particular, the eternal and the individual,” as well as “the inward and the outward,” to quote his words.15 It addresses the age-old problem of how the individual can appropriate anything of the Eternal while remaining finite and particular. Does not the Eternal negate the concept that the temporal can appropriate anything of the Eternal—at least in the equivocal sense—or that the particular can appropriate the Universal to any meaningful degree? Rejecting Hegel’s theory of the Absolute, which unfolds in history to shape and determine human life, Kierkegaard focused on Abraham’s relationship with God to propose an engaging solution.
In brief, each person’s self is in relationship with itself and, as such, is a “synthesis” of the self in its relation with itself. But the self, in relating itself to the self, is also relating itself to that Power which constitutes the whole phenomenon of relation.16 Kierkegaard defines the self as Spirit and Spirit as self. This relationship forms the synthesis that binds the essential elements of humankind’s nature. Writes Kierkegaard, “Man is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity.”17 But so regarded, “man is not yet a self.” It is only when that self is in relationship with the “Power which constituted the whole relation” that the self can “attain and remain in equilibrium,”18 for “by relating itself to its own self and by willing to be itself the self is grounded transparently in the Power which posited it.”19
Would Paul have agreed with Kierkegaard that from a “spiritual” viewpoint, Kierkegaard’s position is precisely what he was trying to articulate? That only the extent to which Paul stood in an “absolute” relationship with God, which only God could make possible, could Paul experience his life fulfilled as an “ontological” new creation—as a self in equilibrium with itself? Yet, for Paul, even that was only possible because of the death and resurrection of Christ, who, as the Universal Son of God, took on flesh, thus becoming a particular individual and thereby representing the particular in every human being as well as preparing the self for the status of becoming “higher than the universal.” Through one man, Christ, all humans now enjoy the power and the presence of the Personal Transcendent Universal that cleanses and renews their finite existence.
For Kierkegaard and Paul, the efficacy of this relationship, or of humankind’s absolute relationship with the Absolute, rests on “faith.” Both Paul and Kierkegaard cite the Patriarch Abraham’s belief in God’s promise as pivotal to their understanding of human wholeness. For Paul, the death of the promised Messiah caught everyone off-guard, becoming something of a “scandal,” while for Kierkegaard, the Abrahamic drama involved an absurdity, a paradox that only “faith” can fathom. Writes Kierkegaard:
Faith is precisely this paradox, that the individual as the particular is higher than the universal, is justified over against it, is not subordinate but superior—yet in such a way, be it observed, that it is the particular individual who, after he has been subordinated as the particular to the universal, now through the universal becomes the individual who as the particular is superior to the universal, for the fact that the individual as the particular stands in an absolute relation to the absolute.20
Granted, the above captures transcendence in its highest philosophical form; nonetheless, it provides spiritual illumination for the human condition. Whatever one may think of Kierkegaard’s “existentialism,” his analysis of the self in relation to the Absolute captures Paul’s own hunger for a self-fulfillment, which compelled him to proclaim: “it is no longer I who live but it is Christ who lives in me” (Gal 1:20). In this unification of Paul’s individuality with Christ’s universality, the particular in Paul became greater than the universal condition that defines human existence. As Schweitzer, reflecting on Paul’s attainment to this end, comments, Paul’s “greatest achievement was to grasp, as the thing essential to being a Christian, the experience of union with Christ.”21 And that is precisely what Gal 1:20 celebrates.
Schweitzer would go on to offer that by “simply designating Jesus ‘our Lord’ Paul raises Him above all the temporally conditioned conceptions in which the mystery of His personality might be grasped.” In so doing, Paul set “Him forth as the Spiritual Being, who transcends all human definitions, to whom we have to surrender ourselves in order to experience in Him the true law of our existence and our being.”22
2. Augustine, Confessions, 150–51, 192–93.
3. Armstrong, St.Paul, 58.
4. James, Varieties, 300.
5. Underhill, Mysticism, xiv.
6. Ibid.
7. Schweitzer, Mysticism of Paul, 3–5.
8. Ibid.
9. Crossan, Birth of Christianity, xxiii.
10. Murphy-O’Connor, Paul: His Story, 5–6.
