Paul’s Dialectical Teaching
You Cannot Get There, You Can Only Be There
Tuesday, April 7, 2015
For Paul, community is the living organism that communicates the Gospel message. Paul, like Jesus, wants to change culture, not just send people away to a far off heaven! If Christ’s cosmic message doesn’t take form in a concrete group of people then, as far as Paul is concerned, it is an unbelievable message. An autonomous Christian is as impossible as an independent arm or leg. It will never work. Arms and legs exist only as parts. Believers exist as parts of the whole, the Body of Christ. Their very existence is the state that Paul calls love. Their existence is love. When Paul says “without love I am nothing” (1 Corinthians 13:2), he implies that he is inside of another Being who is Love. We train for this by loving real, live people. For Paul, this is what he means by Christ: the participatory mystery of Jesus continued through space and time in us!
Paul sees what we eventually call the “communion of saints” as alive, real, and operative in this world. I like to call it an “energy field” created by all those who share various parts of Christ. “Salvation” is something we can participate in right here and now. No one individual is adequate to the task, yet we said they could be. No wonder so many people have either inflated or negative self-images. The paradox, of course, is that many who go to church today are not at all in the love energy field, and many who do not belong to church at all fully exemplify it!
When Paul addresses his letters to “the saints,” he is clearly not speaking of our later Roman idea of canonized saints. He is speaking of the people who make up his living communities and who are participating in this shared life of love in this world.
Paul does not make heroes of individuals, but as members of the Body they “shine like stars” as “perfect children of God among a deceitful and underhanded brood” (Philippians 2:15). Following directly from Jesus, Paul sees his small communities as an adequate “leaven” by which God will eventually change the whole debauched Roman Empire. Talk about patience and confidence!
Gateway to Silence:
I am not separate.
References:
Adapted from Great Themes of Paul: Life as Participation, disc 9 (CD);
St. Paul: The Misunderstood Mystic (CD, MP3 download)
