Читать книгу Transcendence and Fulfillment - Benjamin W. Farley - Страница 7

It was Augustine who first declared that he wished only “to know God and the Soul,” but never at the expense of imagining himself as anything other than a restless heart longing to find peace in God.2 Time and again, his commentaries and essays speak of the human condition that ever humbles him before God. This is especially portrayed in Augustine’s later soliloquies and throughout his masterpiece: Confessions. Nonetheless, in some of Augustine’s earlier writings, his piety took the form of what Schweitzer would call “an in-God mysticism,” which was different from Paul’s, as Augustine truly wanted to ascend the neoplatonic ladder of intellectual ascent (so popular in his day) and thereby become enveloped “in-God.”

Paul’s soul equally longed to know the truth about God and himself, about his people’s ancient aspirations, and his religion’s capacity to fulfill his soul. With the rise in the hope of the coming kingdom of God, Paul wanted to be part of its centuries-awaited movement, to be part of its action, and to be as blessed by the eternal glory of God as a mortal may. Paul writes that he experienced intense moments of mystical unity with the Ineffable, too deep for words, that opened his life to the Eternal. Nonetheless, Paul’s transcendent experiences were never quite as ecstatically sustained as Augustine’s intellectual ascents as reported in his Confessions; rather, Paul’s were mediated—though not always—through the living Christ. It is evident, however, that even in those ascents not mediated by Christ, Paul nonetheless experienced moments of indisputable ecstatic union with “God,” if not a sense of being “assimilated” into God’s presence. I say “assimilated” because in Christ Paul found a new portal to life—a gateway to God that filled him with a clarity he had never experienced before and that freed him from the binding restrictions of his rabbinical Judaism.

As Karen Armstrong has observed of the time, “no vast ontological gulf separated the human from the divine.”3 Longing for such unification was relevant to the age. That this longing influenced Paul is undeniable. No passage makes this clearer than the following: “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal 2:20).

Whatever Paul’s intention, his verse resounds with the import of a metaphysical statement. It is both declarative and noetic. It is declarative because it asserts without ambiguity Paul’s desired self-identity; it is noetic because it is rooted in his intellectual self-understanding, which is what “noetic” means. William James considered the latter a principal aspect of mystical experiences, which in this case is certainly applicable to Paul. James defined the noetic as a state “of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect.” Such a state includes “illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for aftertime.”4

In concert with James, Evelyn Underhill’s subsequent study of mysticism provided an equally engaging window into the soul of “spiritual consciousness.” Her definition of mysticism also illuminates Paul’s. Underhill writes: “Broadly speaking, I understand it [mysticism] to be the expression of the innate tendency of the human spirit towards complete harmony with the transcendental order.”5 As Underhill goes on to state: “This tendency . . . gradually captures the whole field of consciousness” . . . and attains its highest end “in the experience called ‘mystical union.’”6

Not long after both James’ and Underhill’s work, Albert Schweitzer offered a similar definition, but he made a distinction in arguing that Paul’s mysticism (as Schweitzer preferred to address Paul’s response to the Transcendent) was never an “in-God mysticism” but was instead an “in-Christ mysticism.” The former would have been unthinkable to Paul in Schweitzer’s mind, as Paul’s avowed monotheism could never have embraced the idea of absolute oneness with God. God is God; human beings are not, pure and simple.7 In spite of this point, however, we find in 1 Corinthians Paul’s allusions to a number of mystical experiences that contradict Schweitzer’s position, opening Paul to “depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect.” Schweitzer would go on to distinguish between what he called “primitive mysticism” and “intellectual mysticism.” Primitive mysticism seeks to unite itself with the divine through rituals and ceremonies, whereas intellectual mysticism is “a common possession of humanity.” Schweitzer defined the latter as occurring “whenever thought makes the ultimate effort to conceive the relation of the personality to the universal.”8 He concluded that Paul’s mysticism was a mixture of the two. Schweitzer further argued that Paul’s in-Christ union with God—also available to others—was rooted in Paul’s eschatological views and as such intended primarily for the elect.

All three studies shed immense light concerning Paul’s life and thought. In his Galatians statement, Paul’s proclaimed union with Christ reveals the depth of his noetic experiences, thus becoming the existential nucleus of his consciousness and being. In doing so, Paul set himself on a path that Schleiermacher would express philosophically in his principle concerning the feeling of absolute dependence of the finite upon the infinite. For Schleiermacher, the historical Jesus personified this feeling to perfection, thus making Christ’s God-consciousness a gateway to human salvation. For Paul, however, it is more than Christ’s “God-consciousness” that opens the door to a new life indwelled by God’s Spirit; rather, it is Christ’s death and resurrection, embracing all humanity—Schweitzer’s limitation notwithstanding—that Paul took to be actual events of God’s mighty acts of history. For Paul and for theology in general, the latter (that God actually enters history) is what underwrites all faith and, without which, faith would be delusional, or merely an act of human hope and aspiration.

We cannot underestimate Paul’s Gal 2:20 passage, because it encapsulates the heart of Pauline theology concerning that alone which fulfills human existence: the realization that Christ is one’s truest link with the Eternal. One might call it Paul’s normative principle, a supposition on which all else is based, especially his ethics. This is true, though his views are laden with presuppositions that were inseparable from his era’s cosmological perspective. In addition, Paul incorporated other significant principles he derived principally from a minimum of four sources: (1) his knowledge of the Jesus movement, (2) his understanding of the Messiah as envisioned in the Septuagint and late Jewish apocalyptic writings, (3) his dissatisfaction with rabbinical casuistry, and (4) his fifteen years of concentrated reflection prior to and including the time he first met with Peter, James, and John, or attended the so-called Jerusalem Conference of Acts 12:25.

Let us begin with Paul’s presuppositions. All of them were part of the age into which he was born. The first is his acceptance of a realm of transcendence that is superior to any created dominion of time, matter, or space. Both Judaism and Christianity still hold to this cosmological view. Its corollary enjoined what the New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan has labeled sarcophobia, or a fear of the flesh, if not a wary disdain of the physical realm.9

This presupposition was not Paul’s alone. It predates the apostle, if not Plato, whose mentor Socrates enshrined it in Plato’s doctrine of the two realms of what can be known: the one permanent, unbegotten, perfect, and eternal, versus its counterpart in the impermanent, begotten, imperfect, and passing. The one represents true Being, the other becoming. The one has ever been, the other is purely derivative. Hinduism knows of the same presupposition under the names of Brahman and Maya, or Purusia and Prakriti, though not identical with Plato’s realm of ideas.

As a child of his time, Paul was influenced by this deeply embedded cultural view. In truth, he never thought to challenge it, nor did few others, save the Sophists. It was a factor of everyone’s Weltanschauung. Even Jesus shared it. Said Jesus, “God is Spirit and those who worship God must worship him in spirit and in truth” (John 4:24). For Paul and Jesus, there is no way to escape the phenomenon of transcendence—that spiritual dimension that puts one’s self-understanding in question, resulting in either a heightened or disturbing consciousness of one’s relationship with God. Speaking of this condition of humankind in general, Paul writes: “For what can be known about God is plain to them. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made” (Rom 1:20).

That is primal transcendence in its most latent form, waiting only to be seized and appropriated as the guiding light of one’s soul. Years before Paul, Plato wrestled with a similar, though purely intellectual, form of transcendence, as his mind ascended “upward” toward the highest concepts reason can conceive. Plato’s legacy dominated the Greco-Asian world, even among those who had never heard of him or read a single word of his works.

At first glance, there is nothing wrong with this view. Of course, the unbegotten precedes all derivative existence. It represents the idea of the Transcendent in its fullest cosmological and ontological essence. That Being should be prior to Non-being is logical, otherwise Non-being is self-contradictory. If Non-being existed before Being, then it would have the metaphysical value of Being. For this reason, the philosophical as well as the scientific conundrum of how anything came from nothing begs the question that countless efforts have sought to resolve. In our modern era, Hume came as close as anyone to resolving it in his maxim “like effects require like causes,” or at a minimum, “equal causes.” Thus Being precedes what is begotten, rendering the idea of Non-being to the putative opposite of Being. It is when one identifies one’s finite and begotten beingness with Being itself that metaphysical boundaries are crossed, which in its most extreme form results in the philosophical position known as monism—that all things are one and the self is nothing more than an extension of the One.

Paul’s struggles with his weaknesses and inner doubts prevented him from falling into such a pitfall, yet he clearly identified his existential being with Christ’s risen life, along with the abolishment of his old self; nonetheless, it is this proclivity that requires attention if we are to appropriate the value of transcendence in our own lives. The abolishment of the old self might be true from a “spiritual” viewpoint, but it establishes a discontinuity of the present self with its unique former self in a way that belies the human condition and the integrity of one’s genuine individuality or personality.

That Paul could not have known this should be recognized, as no one wishes to judge Paul from an anachronistic position. Judging Paul on this basis clearly commits the fallacy known as nunc pro tunc (“now for then”), a bias that holds the past responsible for a range of knowledge inaccessible or unknowable at the time. Yet, if our contemporary era is to draw insight from Paul’s views, adapting them to our perspective is essential. Whatever the self is, it is both a physiological and psychological continuation of its past development; it is a self-conscious moment of its flowing concurrent experiences, all held in anticipation of what is next. The spiritual abolishment of one’s former self does not erode the existential “essence” of one’s present self with its connectivity to its past or to its uncertain future. One can be wary of the “old self’s” power to thwart one’s present and future hope, but one is still the same person. Judaism rejected the continuity of the self with God, though it well understood the reality of the Transcendent and the wholeness it offered. “Whither shall I go from thy presence or flee from thy Spirit?” (Ps 139:7, KJV).

Paul, as a child of his age, embodied the “Platonic ideal” of transcendence in its most integrative form, resulting in a freedom and deliverance he had never imagined possible. The Platonic understanding of transcendence fit in beautifully with Paul’s own Hebraic heritage of one, sole, eternal God, from whom alone all else is derived. Paul might never have read a single dialogue of Plato’s works, nor does he mention the luminary by name, but the Platonic worldview of transcendence, with its high defining universals, was a tacit presupposition of the Greco-Asian era. We cannot know if it was a factor in Paul’s “formal” education, since his commitment to his Hebraic tradition prevails. However, if Paul knew anything of Philo of Alexandria, then the synthesis of Hebraic thought with Plato’s ideas was already rooted in his sub-consciousness. As for Paul’s knowledge of Stoicism, it is a well-recognized aspect of Paul’s intellectual heritage.10

Paul’s existential and ontological identification of his inner self with the Transcendent (become historical in Christ) leads to a second presupposition of the time: that the created order of life’s cycles, its struggles and opportunities, its brevity and limits—indeed the whole physical realm—pales in comparison to the attainment of life’s highest good. Like Orpheus’ “prison house of the soul,” the body itself is but an “earthly tent,” destined to pass away (1 Cor 5:1). Plato’s Apology, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and Epicurus’ views all entertained the same premise. As in the case of transcendence, such a view, when carried to the extreme, created yet another disconnect with Paul’s Jewish heritage by introducing into Christianity a Greco-Asian motif foreign to its Hebraic past. Consider the following.

In the Old Testament the (hesed) love of God, along with God’s zeal for justice and righteousness (zedek), never endorses a diminution of the physical realm’s worth. Rather, it assigns paramount importance to the present, to the now, not solely to a transcendent realm or some distant time to come in the future. Life’s wealth of riches is to be enjoyed and shared, not renounced or avoided. We are creatures of flesh and spirit, not simply spirit. Nor is the life of created matter to be defined in demeaning terms, such as Paul does in his letters. Unbegotten, eternal, imperishable, and perfect Being belongs to God. The begotten, mortal, perishable, and finite qualities of beingness belong to humankind. Understanding this biblical injunction preserves the idea of God as holy, eternal, and ineffable; yet it supports the conviction that human life is nonetheless “a little lower than God’s” (Ps 8), with a divinely-endowed worth all its own. Paul’s presupposition regarding the low estate of “the flesh” compromises its divine dignity, which he considered lost, thereby undermining the true gifts of humankind’s potential in the present.

Paul was comfortably at home in believing that only minds, wills, and hearts transformed by a transcendent love of God in Christ can experience life’s highest fulfillment, free of the distractions of the physical realm and its fall into sin. His view still carries an incontestable truth. From Socrates to the present, transcendence in its noblest form has inspired the world. But that is not the question. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that in Paul’s mind, the end time was coming. The physical world was passing away and was therefore less deserving of full commitment or value. Christ would soon return, though when, no one knew. Nevertheless, Paul’s belief in the end time, with all the chaos that would be predicted to ensue, set Christianity on a course that led, by the end of the second century CE, to a retreat from the worthiness of the vocational calls of the created order. In Schweitzer’s mind, the Parousia’s delay actually exacerbated the transformation from Paul’s “in-Christ mysticism” to an “in-God mysticism,” significantly altering, if not corrupting, Paul’s original dynamic. For Schweitzer, John’s Gospel clearly reflects this change, as well do the letters of Ignatius. It would take the Reformation to reverse this course in its own trans-valuation of transcendence.

A third unexamined presupposition revolves around the satanic forces and demonic dimensions that the ancient world feared were endemic to human existence. Assuming them to be real (i.e., genuine) metaphysical entities that enjoy conscious awareness and will, Pauline theology casts the human struggle as one pitted not only against the temptations of the flesh, but also against the very powers of darkness that thwart human wholeness and fulfillment. In Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, these forces have been dealt a deathblow; nonetheless, they are operative in the world and must be confronted as well as denied authority in one’s life. Paul is fully cognizant of their power and knows that it is only at the end time, with its final judgment, that they will be condemned and ultimately destroyed. Nevertheless, they are present now and must be contested.

Not surprisingly, however, Paul tamps down their influence wherever he can, confident of their final end. He mentions them less often than do the gospels. Paul refers to “Satan” only eight times in his authentic writings, and he refers to “demons” twice, along with “the powers of this age” or “elemental spirits” twice. Perhaps the most notable of his references is the passage in Rom 8:38. It captures the Hellenistic period’s fear of the unknown and its spirits, as well as its fallen angels and their disastrous impact on humankind. “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 3:38–39).

Note that his list of perils concentrates on both the physical realm as well as the celestial. Known today as the gospels’ “three-storied universe,” with heaven above, earth in the center, and hell and its demons below, this was the spiritual equivalent of the Ptolemaic sevenfold view of the universe, whose coming perspective was less than a century away. Paul’s list encompasses it all. His inventory includes life and death, political rulers as well as evil spirits, the present as well as the future, the intermediate powers of the upper and lower worlds that operate between God and Hades, Earth’s anxieties and uncertainties, and the burdensome weight of a fallen creation. Like the rebellious rulers of Ps 2 who have set their faces against God and his anointed, all are arraigned against any human spirit that would strive to live free of impediments. Although Paul recognizes numerous opportunities for human engagement within God’s created realm (Rom 12:1–21), Paul nonetheless views the created order as captive to an array of evil powers committed to assaulting human life and its full attainment. Thus, he appeals to God’s underpinning of supra-transcendence to battle life’s intervening foes.

In this regard, we are humbled to remember the dramatic currents that were associated in Paul’s era with the coming of the Messiah and the esoteric fantasies it created. For example, the book of Enoch traces the story of Enoch’s ascension into heaven, where Enoch learns of the so-called “Watchers of Heaven” and their ruinous impact (1 Enoch 14–16). This is instrumental in understanding something of Paul’s interior views concerning the rulers and powers of this world:

Go speak to the Watchers of Heaven: . . . Why did you leave lofty, holy Heaven to sleep with women, to defile yourselves with the daughters of men and take them as your wives, and like the children of the earth to beget sons, in your case giants? . . . But you were spiritual and immortal for all generations of the world. So I gave you no wives, for Heaven is your proper dwelling place. And now the giants, offspring of spirit and flesh, will be called spirits on the earth, and earth shall be their dwelling . . . The giants afflict, oppress, destroy, attack over the earth . . . Their spirits will rise up against men and women because they proceed from them.11

Of such is the human predicament for Paul, haunted on earth by these fallen powers, whose purpose now is to torment, harass, and mislead humankind.

It is interesting to note, however, that Paul’s Jewish heritage rejected this view. From its earliest Mosaic roots, not even the Shema summoned its adherents to such a suspicious or combative view of God’s created order. “Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words . . . in your heart. Recite them to your children . . . talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise” (Deut 6:4–7).

This remarkable insight has to do with life now, carried out through one’s center of essential vitality (the heart), to be shared with one’s children in one’s home, cutting across one’s occupation and travels, and guarding and guiding one’s activities by day or by night. It is meant to buoy the soul through life’s quotidian hardships and inescapable encounters with reality, not to be a mantra for escape from the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.”12 It is this sphere in which God becomes real or not. It is here, in God’s earthly realm, with all its tribulations, ironies, disappointments, and “demons,” that God summons the faithful to believe in God, to persevere, and to build God’s kingdom on earth. One could argue that even Jesus’ “Lord’s Prayer” echoes the Shema in a quieter, though equally relevant, form, and yet that it shares with Paul the fear of “being led into temptation” by either God’s divine will or, more horrifyingly, by the powers of the fallen apocalyptic ruling angels.

Paul’s notion of creation’s groaning for its own deliverance (Rom 8:22) is part of his sarcophobia, or fear of the physical realm. In Paul’s view, it has lost its divinely blessed status and has become “subjected to futility” and the “bondage to decay” (Rom 8:20–21). It has slipped into the darkness of fallen powers. The biblical fall, however, clearly contests this assessment. In the Genesis story, the fall pertains to human beings, not to nature. It is human beings whose distaff must bear their children in pain, whose fields challenge humankind with briars and stone and fertile soil that fallen humanity must now plow in sweat. Why? Because of human obstinacy, not because the adamah, or soil—which God created and from which YHWH fashioned human life—has suddenly lost its virility or become demon-possessed. The fault is purely due to humankind’s pride, doubt, and arrogant spirit. Pride and arrogance despoil the human attempt to live transcendentally, because pride and arrogance are foreign to transcendence. The earth itself is good; it remains wholly tov. Any harsh qualities associated with it redound to humankind’s opportunity to take them in stride while seeking to advance God’s kingdom on earth.

Again, to Paul’s credit, he acknowledges life’s crushing reach. Nonetheless, in his mind, “neither hardship, nor distress, nor persecution, nor famine, nor nakedness, nor peril, nor sword can separate one from the love of God in Christ” (Rom 8:28). Embracing the Transcendent enables one to endure as well as conquer these hardships, whether of opposing spirits or of nature. Unity with Christ makes all this possible, while Christ’s intercession with God secures one’s deliverance from the incongruities of existence. This is all welcome and heartfelt news; nevertheless, it clearly reveals a focus different from the simpler summons of Jesus’ inaugural sermon. “The time [kairos] is fulfilled. The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the good news” (Mark 1:15). Jesus’ proclaimed kairos is a time for gratitude and action, for joy and progress, and for personal accountability, however helpful asceticism and religious quiescence are to the human spirit and no matter how distant or near the kingdom of God might be. Human beings are still who they are: existential selves whose past and present consciousness is enfolded into the heart of God even while upholding their unique individuality.

Luther captured this when he rightfully concluded that Christians are simultaneously sinful and justified. Their sinfulness is forgiven and their brokenness mended by the wounds of Christ, but they remain uniquely who they are, which leads to the following question: Was Paul too eager for a transformation that would lift one out of this morass? Is that why the ascetic world of Platonic forms—whether he knew of them directly or indirectly—appealed to Paul as applicable to the efficacy of Jesus’ cross and resurrection? Is it possible—though Pauline scholarship is swift to reject it—that in his cultural subconscious, Paul thought of Christ as the biblical equivalent of a Prometheus or a Dionysus and thus the embodiment of that Universal Spirit or élan that saves humankind, even as Paul found Christ’s lordship superior to Augustus’, whom the Senate of Rome had designated as the Empire’s savior (soter) only four decades earlier? One cannot help but ask this question. Paul’s Christ comes to us as both human and divine (Phil 2:6–8), as a descendent of the house of David, yet as one who emptied himself of his divinity in order to become human. He is no longer just Israel’s long-awaited Messiah, but also the Savior of the world. Thus Paul’s ontological identity becomes inseparable from his spiritual union with the divine Christ, who, appearing in a particular human life, redeems and empowers Paul’s own life, though he remains captive to the flesh. However indebted Paul might have been to later Judaism’s apocalyptical understanding of the kingdom of God and its Son of Man, or Ancient One, a divine-human Christ makes sense only in a world that had already appropriated this concept and all its possibilities into its myths of dying and rising divine heroes. This is the ingredient that is so often denied by opponents of this position.

Life’s powers of darkness, however, did not end with the ascendancy of Christ’s triumph of the world. The end time had yet to come. The powers of evil that tempt human minds are not so easily toppled. Today we know them as facets of human choice, mirrored in the limits of human finitude, our DNA, belief systems, and habituation. One thinks of the late medieval period and the fact that Martin Luther’s famous hymn of Ps 46 is beset by the fear of the demonic: “For still our ancient foe dost seek to work us woe, his craft and power are great, and armed with cruel hate, on earth is not his equal.”

Nor did Calvin’s Geneva fare better. Few historians have cut through its darker legacy as powerfully as Paul Kriwaczek in his Yiddish Civilisation: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation. After describing the brutality and backwardness of the age, he writes:

That is not to say that John Calvin was at heart in any way a man of gentle disposition. He was not. In the first four years of the theocratic totalitarian tyranny he founded in Geneva, he had fifty-eight heretics consigned to the stake and seventy-six exiled: in one single year he had forty-three women burned as witches; during a three-month outbreak of plague he executed thirty-four unfortunates for “sowing the pest.” In 1553 he unforgivably sent to the pyre the brilliant Michael Servetus . . . though it is said that Calvin would have preferred a less brutal form of execution.13

Not to mention the hanging of witches in Salem during the reign of the Puritans in New England.

Luther, Calvin, and the founders of the Plymouth Colony were avid followers of Paul’s theology. Their love of Christ need not be doubted, nor need a more “enlightened” age condemn their Christian views. The point is that we humans are flesh and spirit, ru’ah and adamah, pneuma and sarx. Our existential complexity is inseparable from our past, our struggles of the present, and our anticipations of the future. It is very much one’s existential self that motivates one to embody the spirit of Jesus’ love, though confined in an “earthen vessel,” as Paul himself was forced to acknowledge in his moments of stark lucidity and self-reflection (2 Cor 4:7).

Transcendence has its healing balm with power to mend all ailing hearts. To deny this would betray the very power and comfort, direction and enlightenment that all religions seek. It would also neutralize the human heart’s own experience of the reality of the nearness of God that speaks to one’s deepest self. More than anything, this awareness captures the essence of Paul’s love of Christ, whose death and resurrection transformed his sense of God’s nearness into a reality and not just a hope or facet of Hellenistic idealism. In truth, Paul rightfully gave the world this vision of historical attainment in spite of the Weltanschauung that shaped his understanding of the phenomenon of transcendence. Celebrating Paul’s Christ Jesus and Paul himself as historical exemplars of the appropriation of the highest and holiest reality the mind can conceive is relevant to all time.

By way of critique, however, Günter Bornkamm took exception with much of the above. In his book entitled Paul, Bornkamm rejected any attempts to assess Paul’s Christ Jesus as a “concept of God” or the “idea of God” imposed upon the figure of Jesus.14 We have noted that Albert Schweitzer rejected the same temptation, observing that any direct appropriation of the divine was foreign to Paul’s thought and could only be achieved through a Mediator. Bornkamm’s work, however, was generated in the late 1960s as a culmination of the quest for the historical Jesus in Bornkamm’s day. Since Bornkamm’s period, the latest quest of the historical Jesus—as represented in the works of the Jesus Society and the scholars of the Five Gospels, the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library as well as the Qumran scrolls, and in Crossan’s probing analyses of Jesus as sage and revolutionary—has brought new “evidence” to light in the role that gnostic, Platonic, and Roman imperialism played in shaping Christianity’s first-century views. Factors other than eschatology, on which Schweitzer launched his Pauline masterpiece, were at play. To these factors we must return, but there are philosophical considerations of Paul’s identity with Christ that deserve review and can enrich our personal search for fulfillment.

It is Søren Kierkegaard who, in modern times, has forced theologians to ponder the problems and possibilities raised by any “self’s” relationship with the divine. These problems and possibilities have to do with Kierkegaard’s analysis of the self’s relationship with itself and of that self’s relationship, in turn, to God. In both Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death, he restates the problem in numerous ways. Both essays represent the Dane’s reflections on God’s call to Abraham to offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice to God. It involves a philosophical dalliance, even a teleological suspension of the ethical, between the “universal and the particular, the eternal and the individual,” as well as “the inward and the outward,” to quote his words.15 It addresses the age-old problem of how the individual can appropriate anything of the Eternal while remaining finite and particular. Does not the Eternal negate the concept that the temporal can appropriate anything of the Eternal—at least in the equivocal sense—or that the particular can appropriate the Universal to any meaningful degree? Rejecting Hegel’s theory of the Absolute, which unfolds in history to shape and determine human life, Kierkegaard focused on Abraham’s relationship with God to propose an engaging solution.

In brief, each person’s self is in relationship with itself and, as such, is a “synthesis” of the self in its relation with itself. But the self, in relating itself to the self, is also relating itself to that Power which constitutes the whole phenomenon of relation.16 Kierkegaard defines the self as Spirit and Spirit as self. This relationship forms the synthesis that binds the essential elements of humankind’s nature. Writes Kierkegaard, “Man is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity.”17 But so regarded, “man is not yet a self.” It is only when that self is in relationship with the “Power which constituted the whole relation” that the self can “attain and remain in equilibrium,”18 for “by relating itself to its own self and by willing to be itself the self is grounded transparently in the Power which posited it.”19

Would Paul have agreed with Kierkegaard that from a “spiritual” viewpoint, Kierkegaard’s position is precisely what he was trying to articulate? That only the extent to which Paul stood in an “absolute” relationship with God, which only God could make possible, could Paul experience his life fulfilled as an “ontological” new creation—as a self in equilibrium with itself? Yet, for Paul, even that was only possible because of the death and resurrection of Christ, who, as the Universal Son of God, took on flesh, thus becoming a particular individual and thereby representing the particular in every human being as well as preparing the self for the status of becoming “higher than the universal.” Through one man, Christ, all humans now enjoy the power and the presence of the Personal Transcendent Universal that cleanses and renews their finite existence.

For Kierkegaard and Paul, the efficacy of this relationship, or of humankind’s absolute relationship with the Absolute, rests on “faith.” Both Paul and Kierkegaard cite the Patriarch Abraham’s belief in God’s promise as pivotal to their understanding of human wholeness. For Paul, the death of the promised Messiah caught everyone off-guard, becoming something of a “scandal,” while for Kierkegaard, the Abrahamic drama involved an absurdity, a paradox that only “faith” can fathom. Writes Kierkegaard:

Faith is precisely this paradox, that the individual as the particular is higher than the universal, is justified over against it, is not subordinate but superior—yet in such a way, be it observed, that it is the particular individual who, after he has been subordinated as the particular to the universal, now through the universal becomes the individual who as the particular is superior to the universal, for the fact that the individual as the particular stands in an absolute relation to the absolute.20

Granted, the above captures transcendence in its highest philosophical form; nonetheless, it provides spiritual illumination for the human condition. Whatever one may think of Kierkegaard’s “existentialism,” his analysis of the self in relation to the Absolute captures Paul’s own hunger for a self-fulfillment, which compelled him to proclaim: “it is no longer I who live but it is Christ who lives in me” (Gal 1:20). In this unification of Paul’s individuality with Christ’s universality, the particular in Paul became greater than the universal condition that defines human existence. As Schweitzer, reflecting on Paul’s attainment to this end, comments, Paul’s “greatest achievement was to grasp, as the thing essential to being a Christian, the experience of union with Christ.”21 And that is precisely what Gal 1:20 celebrates.

Schweitzer would go on to offer that by “simply designating Jesus ‘our Lord’ Paul raises Him above all the temporally conditioned conceptions in which the mystery of His personality might be grasped.” In so doing, Paul set “Him forth as the Spiritual Being, who transcends all human definitions, to whom we have to surrender ourselves in order to experience in Him the true law of our existence and our being.”22

2. Augustine, Confessions, 150–51, 192–93.

3. Armstrong, St.Paul, 58.

4. James, Varieties, 300.

5. Underhill, Mysticism, xiv.

6. Ibid.

7. Schweitzer, Mysticism of Paul, 3–5.

8. Ibid.

9. Crossan, Birth of Christianity, xxiii.

10. Murphy-O’Connor, Paul: His Story, 5–6.

11. Barnstone, Other Bible, 487.

12. Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 3, scene 1.

13. Kriwaczek, Yiddish, 178.

14. Bornkamm, Paul, 237.

15. Kierkegaard, Fear, 146.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid., 147.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid., 66.

21. Schweitzer, Mysticism of Paul, 377.

22. Ibid., 379.