of God that enriches life and sets imaginations free to live by the highest nuances that address the human plight. Again, for Paul, that possibility occurs only through Christ; nevertheless, in our contemporary arena, it can happen elsewhere whenever one’s heart is open to the mystery of the Eternal as one’s companion and not as one’s avenger or retaliator. The danger of the latter, however, raises the possibility of the loss of “God’s personality” as well as the “personality of the searcher,” especially if one becomes absorbed in the Ineffable Cloud of Unknowing. For that reason, philosophy has rightly questioned whether one’s contact with the Transcendent is with “reality,” or merely an epiphenomenal experience of one’s loneliest loneliness. Theology presses the question one step further. If the Transcendent has not, nor cannot, initiate the contact, nor can “interact in history,” then humankind’s experiences of the Transcendent are purely “mental ascents” of one’s own, thus communicating nothing about God, let alone resulting in a “unitive” experience. This “bias” on the part of theology, however, has to be countered on behalf of human experience in general. Any form of “revelation” as such is always a form of transcendence, and its “proof” or “disproof” of a reality beyond the self is a matter of faith and interpretation. The sheer experience of transcendence is often its own reward.
3. The Righteousness of God
For Paul and modern psychology, few orders of the spirit are equal to the healing power of grace. It was present all along in Judaism’s experience of God’s hesed love and redeeming zedek, but it took Jesus’ death to awaken Paul’s eyes to the greatest event of his time. For Paul, the righteousness of God—embedded in the story of Abraham and available now to all through faith in Christ—is the answer to what alone redeems life and gives it meaning. It alone is what makes the kingdom of God a reality now, though its consummation is yet to come.
The question today, however, remains different for us. Simply stated: Is Paul’s approach valid for the “universality of humankind”? Can the effectiveness of forgiveness endure, shorn from its rootage in the mystery of God’s personality, or in the power of the living God’s unique redemptive event in Christ, without reducing it to a mere ideal or a powerful psychological phenomenon? And if the latter occurs, then what of the remarkable life of him who inspired it: Jesus of Nazareth? Was his cross a tragic accident of history, or a genuine conduit of God’s eternal grace? In the end, only faith can answer that question.
4. Apollonian Restraint in a Dionysian Age
The fourth pillar is founded on the understanding that a life without restraint loses its liberty, its potential for full growth and for self-fulfillment. Paul’s was an age that wavered between Gnosticism, a vaunted wisdom for the few and elite, and antinomian libertinism, which knew no bounds of indulgence—an age not wholly unlike our own. It was also an age “between the times,” between the end of the Old Testament era and the coming of the kingdom of God. To both Gnostics and Antinomians, Paul had to say, “No.” On what basis may we say the same?
5. Toward Universals That Transform Life
Paul’s fifth pillar of wisdom recognizes that there are definable universal values that are commensurate with self-attainment without mitigating the mystical and transcendent forces that nurture the inward person. Paul knew his era longed for such values, even desiring to live by them, but that it was caught in a web of darkness that blinded its inner vision and paralyzed its will. Beyond the higher values he would come to espouse, Paul would add his immortal three: faith, hope, and love.
6. The Delay of the Angels
No one knows the future, yet to live open to the power of the Transcendent to shape one’s future is essential. Granted, today, Pauline eschatology is deemed too remote and esoteric to take seriously; nonetheless, for Paul it was an integral aspect of wisdom. Does it still illuminate existence for our postmodern world?
7. Human Fate: Fulfillment and Destiny
Paul’s seventh pillar rests on the understanding that human fate, or one’s destiny, does not have to end in despair. For Paul, thanks to Christ, individuals may now grasp their destiny with vigor and courage, making their lives a tabernacle for good. To that extent, each individual is responsible for what he or she believes, does, or becomes, thus underscoring both the reality of the phenomenon of transcendence and its recognition as essential to human fulfillment.
In truth, the seven pillars are interrelated and interwoven throughout Paul’s letters. Though the following study attempts to single each out for discussion, the shadows and nuances of the others are always present.
With the above in mind, we proceed to a critique of Paul’s theology and its enduring value.
1. Furnish, Moral Teaching, 15.
2. Pillar One: God and the Self—Transcendence
It was Augustine who first declared that he wished only “to know God and the Soul,” but never at the expense of imagining himself as anything other than a restless heart longing to find peace in God.2 Time and again, his commentaries and essays speak of the human condition that ever humbles him before God. This is especially portrayed in Augustine’s later soliloquies and throughout his masterpiece: Confessions. Nonetheless, in some of Augustine’s earlier writings, his piety took the form of what Schweitzer would call “an in-God mysticism,” which was different from Paul’s, as Augustine truly wanted to ascend the neoplatonic ladder of intellectual ascent (so popular in his day) and thereby become enveloped “in-God.”
Paul’s soul equally longed to know the truth about God and himself, about his people’s ancient aspirations, and his religion’s capacity to fulfill his soul. With the rise in the hope of the coming kingdom of God, Paul wanted to be part of its centuries-awaited movement, to be part of its action, and to be as blessed by the eternal glory of God as a mortal may. Paul writes that he experienced intense moments of mystical unity with the Ineffable, too deep for words, that opened his life to the Eternal. Nonetheless, Paul’s transcendent experiences were never quite as ecstatically sustained as Augustine’s intellectual ascents as reported in his Confessions; rather, Paul’s were mediated—though not always—through the living Christ. It is evident, however, that even in those ascents not mediated by Christ, Paul nonetheless experienced moments of indisputable ecstatic union with “God,” if not a sense of being “assimilated” into God’s presence. I say “assimilated” because in Christ Paul found a new portal to life—a gateway to God that filled him with a clarity he had never experienced before and that freed him from the binding restrictions of his rabbinical Judaism.
As Karen Armstrong has observed of the time, “no vast ontological gulf separated the human from the divine.”3 Longing for such unification was relevant to the age. That this longing influenced Paul is undeniable. No passage makes this clearer than the following: “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal 2:20).
Whatever Paul’s intention, his verse resounds with the import of a metaphysical statement. It is both declarative and noetic. It is declarative because it asserts without ambiguity Paul’s desired self-identity; it is noetic because it is rooted in his intellectual self-understanding, which is what “noetic” means. William James considered the latter a principal aspect of mystical experiences, which in this case is certainly applicable to Paul. James defined the noetic as a state “of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect.” Such a state includes “illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate
