Theological Journal – January 24 From Culture Warrior to Christian Apostle: The Case of Saul/Paul

I will interrupt the series on Attention today with this piece I hope might prove timely. In it I draw on two works: Michael Gorman’s Reading Paul and Andrew Roots, Faith Formation in a Secular Age.

Saul the Culture Warrior

The two main reasons Saul wanted to eliminate the church were


(1) its preaching of a crucified, cursed Messiah and                                                                                 (2) its embrace of Gentiles in a way that polluted Israel. (13)


His zeal in this matter found a precedent in Phineas who according to Numbers 25, was so zealous that he killed an Israelite man and his Midianite consort to purify the people from the immorality and idolatry brought into the community by non-Israelites. Phinehas was rewarded with divine approval and a perpetual priesthood (Num 25:10–13). A psalm celebrates his action and says that it was “reckoned to him as righteousness” (Ps 106:30–31). (13)


He is one of only two figures in the Old Testament of whom this is said. The other is Abraham. Before embracing Christ Phinehas was Saul’s paradigm of righteousness. (13-14)

Phineas was a culture warrior to use today’s lingo. He wanted to purify and expand religious the space in his world. This was his raison d’etre, his glory and claim before God. Saul found in him a faithful and effective mentor.

Paul the Apostle

The sea-change for Paul was precipitated by his Damascus Road encounter with the risen Jesus. This chart summarizes this before and after for Saul turned Paul in this meeting.

Before the appearance of Jesus to him	Paul After the appearance of Jesus to him
Paul rejected the cross and the crucified one	embraced the cross and the crucified one
denied Jesus’ resurrection	affirmed Jesus’ resurrection
dissociated God from Jesus and Jesus from messiahship	associated God with Jesus and Jesus with messiahship
excluded Gentiles, as Gentiles, from the covenant people	included Gentiles who embraced Jesus, as Gentiles, in the covenant people
focused on the Torah	focused on the Messiah
sought Israel’s purity and his own justification through violent zeal	sought Israel’s purpose and his own justification through the loving obedience of the Son of God and his participation in it
opposed and sought the destruction of the Jesus-is-Messiah movement	affirmed and joined the Jesus-is-Messiah movement, sought its universal expansion, and willingly suffered for it

(15)


No longer was Paul’s model and mentor Phineas but now Abraham who found “righteousness” in a very different way.


This encounter with Jesus gave the lie to the Phineas-model. Things had changed drastically. Jesus turned Phineas on his head. Abraham becomes for Paul his mentor in righteousness. And he was so in virtue of finding his righteousness in a “weak act of faith” (Root, Faith Formation in a Secular Age, 124).


Faith now stood in place of force as the expression of righteousness. Because Abraham seeks God in what is impossible, God’s promise that he and Sarah would bear a child at an age beyond child-bearing years, his trust in God n and through the negation (the crucifixion) of his experience became righteousness for him. Not the force of the spear but the weakness of faith prevailed for him. Out of their barrenness God acts.


“Abraham is reckoned righteous because he will seek God in the negation of his own experience, giving fidelity to a new reality where from death comes life. Abraham uniquely sees that this negation (that loss) might be the very locale for God’s ministering being to come to him . . . he is willing to enter a reality where what cannot be is made possible by the act of God’s gift.” (Root, 126)


Paul embraced the negation of his experience, his blindness in Damascus, and in faith found righteousness with God. Ananias hesitantly comes to him in this negation and becomes his minister in his weakness. “Ananias becomes Paul’s minister, and as he does, he invites Paul to take hold of the gift of faith: to let go of his Phinehas-shaped righteousness, and to walk into negation (cross), where he will experience the very righteousness of the risen Christ who will make Paul’s own negation into new life (resurrection).” (Root, 127)

From Culture Warrior to Christian Apostle

The move from culture warrior to Christian apostle is

-not about keeping and purifying sacred space but rather a meeting of others in their places of death and negation

-not about enforcing immanent possibilities but rather an openness to resurrection/new life in conflicted situations

-not about overpowering the infidel and their idolatries but rather by proximate, patient presence with the infidel hoping to implode the idolatry from within and wooing the infidel to the way of Jesus

-not about self-assertion for oneself but rather self-sacrifice for others

-not about protecting God’s holiness and honor but rather following Christ into the darkness of the world trusting the contagion of his holiness and the honor of his abasement (Phil.2:6-11) to work their “deep magic” (C. S. Lewis) in witnessing and transforming the situation

-not trusting to power and violence but rather risking oneself to “violence of love” (Oscar Romero) as a way of life.

From Phineas to Paul is the way beyond the ever-popular practice of culture war. That is a dead end, as we should know by now. The way of Paul is the way of the cross, that seldom-tried, “not much loved” tradition (Moltmann) deep in the memory of the church. The way from Phineas to Paul stand open, however slightly. Do we care to trace the apostle’s journey into that way of death and resurrection Jesus trod and opened for us?