What’s A Christian, Anyway?
My sophomore year in college, I was having issues with the leadership of Inter-Varsity, the fellowship group, of which I was an officer, and which I would soon leave. I started to feel the leaders were too wedded to rules and regulations at the cost of the Gospel. I’d been challenged by a fraternity president when I’d accidentally said, in line with our IVCF philosophy, that “Christians and fraternity guys share some common goals.” He’d been incensed. “I’m a Christian,” he said, “and a fraternity guy. Who are you to make that distinction?” The criticism had stung.
Later, I was in the car with Inter-Varsity’s president, Bill. He brought up that fraternity president in an unflattering way, and I commented, “I think you need to go easy on him. He’s a Christian, too.”
Bill sneered slightly. “Oh,” he said, “And how are you defining ‘Christian’?”
“The same way Paul did,” I shot back, and quoted him Romans 10: 9: “‘If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.'”
Bill gave a little chuckle, as if I didn’t know what I was talking about, but did not respond.
After all, how could he argue with Paul?
Poor, Poor Pitiful Paul
All of which gets into a sore topic for me–the way we in the church either misuse or beat up The Apostle Paul.
Here’s a recent chart going around on Facebook:
Most of what this chart says, Biblically, is true or at least arguably true. But the section about Paul is completely baffling if anyone has actually studied Paul’s behavior and theology. Paul is not “sexist, chauvinistic, judgmental,” and “xenophobic.” In fact, Paul is arguably more open-minded and inclusive than Jesus! Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman has said that Paul is the most liberal voice in the Bible–and he’s right.
Progressive Paul
Paul is certainly the least xenophobic voice in the Bible. Virtually everyone in the Bible has a bee in their bonnet about some other race, religion or ethnicity. Even Jesus famously, and disturbingly, called a Syro-Phoenician woman a dog, simply because she wasn’t Jewish. And though He was surprisingly involved with Gentiles, both individuals and crowds of them, in the Gospels, there’s no doubt that He viewed His responsibility as first and foremost to His own people, the Jews.
After His ascension, His disciples weren’t much inclined to change that. Acts reports that the apostles, led by Jesus’ half-brother James, pretty much stayed in Jerusalem and kept their ministry to Jews. There are some notable exceptions, the most important being Peter’s conversion of the Roman centurion Cornelius and his family in Acts 10. But other than that, the guiding assumption of Jesus’ disciples was that in order to become Christian, one had first to become a Jew, which meant circumcision for men, and observance of Jewish holy days and dietary restrictions.
Paul would have none of that. His peculiar calling, which nearly got him kicked out as an apostle by the Jerusalemites, was that, since the Kingdom had arrived in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, then that meant that all the predictions that Zion would be a light to the nations, and that all nations would come to the Lord, must now be true as well; therefore the Gospel must be given to the Gentiles. They were no longer considered unclean outsiders to the secrets of JHWH. If they had faith, they were as “in” as the highest high priest.
New Age Paul
It is important to understand how radical Paul’s teachings were. They were so extreme they often got him beat up by crowds of his fellow diaspora Jews, and resulted in his arrest in Jerusalem. Some scholars today want to argue that perhaps it wasn’t so extreme for him to take such a position–after all, they argue, Jews honored “God-fearers”– Gentiles who observed the Law, abided by monotheism, and visited the Temple, made sacrifices and paid tribute.
But it’s important to note that at their best, God-fearers were still “second class citizens” in Judaism. Unless they were fully converted, including circumcision, they could not enter the Temple past The Court of the Nations–not even as far into the Temple walls as a Jewish woman could get. They would likely not have been allowed into most synagogues.
Paul’s radical insight was that people are “saved by grace, through faith, and not by works.” That meant that “true Israelites” in his estimation were people of any ethnic or racial or cultural background who had faith. Nothing else mattered.
Hence he could say–as I reminded Bill–that if you confess Jesus is Lord, and believe He’s raised from the dead, then you’re a Christian. End of story. By grace, through faith, and not by works. Works, you know– like not being gay.
I’ve tried not being straight, i.e., not being attracted to women. It’s hard work, and it doesn’t work. So it seems to me that, if you’re already gay, then not being gay would be hard work, too. Which, according to Paul, doesn’t save anybody.
Back to the Blessing
Because we were living in the New Age, according to Paul, the clock was turned back to before the Mosaic Law, returning to the Abrahamic promise that “the Seed of Abraham” (which He interpreted as Jesus) would be a blessing to the world. So, to Paul’s mind, the “first class citizens” of the Kingdom of God were people of faith, regardless of–indeed, in spite of–where they may stand in terms of The Law, and especially the Laws which Jesus criticized so roundly–the Laws of “clean and unclean,” of ritual purity. The “ritually impure” would have included Gentiles, menstruating or barren women, the handicapped, eunuchs–and homosexuals.
Inclusive Paul
To Paul, the whole point of the Gospel was that we are saved not by our works, or by whatever “clean” qualities we have, but in spite of our sins, failures, and uncleanness, by the grace of God, and by that alone. Paul was passionate on this. He had no patience with those who might want, for instance, to “phase” in salvation to the Gentiles. As a result, Paul was far more radically inclusive than any of the other apostles, and his unwillingness to compromise made him someone that many diaspora Jews reviled. it is perhaps this uncompromising aspect of his personality, so often on display in his letters, that readers pick up and find distasteful. There’s no question he was a zealot. But he was a zealot for inclusion.
Paul Likes Women!
Paul also, by the way, is unfairly slighted as a sexist chauvinist pig. That’s hardly the case. It is clear from his many letters that he had many female friends and in fact depended on them to be church leaders in the Gentile communities he reached out to. Hear that: Paul actually appointed women to be church leaders. It was only in particular places that he raised concerns about female leadership. Those were places where priestesses were common leaders in pagan worship, often providing sexual services, and apparently assumed that the same would be true in the church.
Again, women’s leadership would have been out of the norm for male-oriented Temple Judaism. But it was all part of the New Age as far as Paul was concerned. “Now there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, but all are one in Christ Jesus,” he writes in Galatians 3: 28. Many scholars argue that this was “the first statement of egalitarianism in human literature.”
Later letters, such as Ephesians, I and II Timothy, and Titus, take a far harder line on women’s leadership and role. But scholarship has determined without question that Paul didn’t write these letters. They were written in his name decades later at a time when the church was far more established and institutional than it was in Paul’s day, and reflect unfortunate attempts to control behavior and not to stir up too much trouble with the Romans.
NEXT: Paul, the LGBT-Rights Convert??!