Whiteley - The Theology of St. Paul

The aim of this book is to expound the Theology of St. Paul. No attempt has been made to consider the 'realities behind' his thought or to apply Pauline teaching to the needs of our own day. These objectives are, of course, legitimate and indeed essential; but there is а grave risk of reading our own concern s into the thought of the Apostle and so of distorting his message. I have therefore confined myself to the limited task of trying to discover what he actually intended to convey to his fellow-Christians when he composed his epistles.

Although this book is devoted to an exposition of St. Paul's theology, it is essential to begin by examining very briefly the background to his thought. lf we are to understand what he means, it is first necessary to realize what questions he was trying to answer. Again, false views about the background to St. Paul's thought go hand in hand with misleading theories concerning the substance of his theology.

 

In this initial chapter we shall treat the background of his beliefs in а summary fashion, before going on to а closer examination of the Apostle's convictions in the remaining nine chapters.

 

When the 'man in the street' hears the Apostle's name mentioned, it of tens conjures up in his mind certain half-formulated ideas which are very closely related to the problem of background. For example, it is commonly thought that St. Paul was the man who ruined Christianity: Christ, it is said, preached the true Gospel, and the church perverted it, St. Paul being the chief off ender. It is thought, for instance, that St. Paul introduced false ideas derived from 'Greek thought' or from the Mystery Religions, or, on the other hand, that he dragged back the infant church into the morass of Judaism from which Our Lord had freed it.

 

W е shall see that St. Paul did not borrow wholesale from the Мystery Religions, though it is true that St. Paul and the devotees of the Mystery cults held in common certain presuppositions which the majority of twentieth-century men do not share; this makes them appear to have been more alike than they really were.

 

Again, we shall see that there is almost nothing in St. Paul's writings which could not have been derived from Judaism or from the apostolic church. On the other hand, we must not imagine that Jews and Gentiles were living wholly apart. On the contrary, they borrowed much from each other. Above all, we must maintain that the authority of St. Paul's writings does not depend upon their background. As Jams Barr has pointed out, ' "Semitic" language and thought is not as such necessarily superior to that of other language-groups. Throughout most of their history the people of God had to strive not against Hellenism at all, but against the Baalim and other gods worshipped by those who were just as "Semitic" as themselves'. St. Paul's thought is in f act mainly Jewish in origin, but that is not the reason why we accept its authority.