Brian McLaren reflects on Paul’s challenging task of implementing Jesus’ inclusive message in a growing spiritual community:
Paul wasn’t trying to define or explain the gospel at all; rather, he was trying to clean up a mess that Jesus had created through his gospel. By mess I mean Jesus had quite effectively ruined the tidy conventional categories of his religious community. In his mind, some prostitutes and tax collectors were closer to God than some Pharisees and priests—and the greatest faith Jesus could find in all Israel was found in the heart of a political enemy who belonged to another religion (Matthew 8:10). Similarly, Jesus broke the rules about clean and unclean, and he kept raising wild and revolutionary new proposals—about the Sabbath, about what’s kosher…. How do you work out a deep shift like this in a community of faithful people who have always defined themselves in exclusive ways?
McLaren highlights Paul’s Letter to the Romans as an example of Paul’s unifying message:
Romans aimed to address a more immediate, practical question in the early Christian movement…: How could Jews and gentiles in all their untamed diversity come and remain together as peers in the kingdom of God without having first- and second-class Christians?…
Paul, like Jesus, is not a modern Western linear-argument type of guy. He’s Middle Eastern. He thinks in circles and speaks in parables. Paul is … the kind [of poet] who understands the power of imagination and has a way with words. His letter (contrary to dominant readings) is no more of a well-reasoned, linear, logical, analytical argument than Jesus’s sermons were. And that’s not a bad thing….
What we have is not a premeditated work of scholarly theology, edited and reedited, complete with footnotes. Rather, Paul is dictating a letter to some people he loves on a subject he loves, expressing the honest, unedited, natural flow of his thoughts and feelings…. If we read Romans keeping these realities in mind, I think we will become more sensitive than ever to the wonderful dance of the Spirit of God and the mind of a man in the context of a community in crisis. Together, the Holy Spirit and Paul make move after move toward the single goal of justifying the gospel as good news for gentiles and Jews alike….
Paul asserts that God doesn’t play favorites. All human beings are on the same level, whatever their religious background. All violate their own conscience, all fall short of God’s glory, all break God’s laws. None can claim an inside track with God just because they have mastered a body of religious knowledge, avoided a list of proscribed behaviors, or identified themselves with a certain label. In this way, Paul renders every mouth silent and everyone accountable to God (Romans 3:19). There is no us versus them, no elite insiders and excluded outsiders. There’s just all of us—Jews and gentiles—and we’re all … united in our need of grace.
Reference:
Brian D. McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith (HarperOne, 2010), 142–143, 144, 146, 148.
Image credit and inspiration: mohammad hassan taheri, untitled (detail), 2023, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. The fluid, impermanent sand slipped through Paul’s once-certain grasp, as his Divine encounter cracked open his clenched knowing and invited him to see from a transformed perspective.
Story from Our Community:
I have often wondered if perhaps I am a complete outsider, even to the ultimate mercy of God. But despite those doubts, at times I have been allowed to glimpse the truth that I am deeply known and accepted for who I am by divine Presence. I’d like to offer this message to others who see themselves on the outside: There are helpers around you, sometimes unseen—but real.
—Paul N.
