The Paul Controversy: Mystic, Rabbi, and Apostle to the Gentiles

The controversy surrounding Paul has become increasingly interesting to me because I no longer believe the only choices available are either accepting Paul as an infallible apostle whose every theological conclusion must be accepted or rejecting him as a fraud who hijacked the teachings of Jesus and created an entirely different religion. Both positions seem too simple. The more I examine Paul through my present theological, metaphysical, and esoteric understanding, the more I see a complicated man standing at the intersection of two worlds. Paul was deeply formed by Judaism, Torah, Pharisaic interpretation, and the apocalyptic expectations of his age, but he was also a mystic who claimed to have experienced the living Christ directly. I have begun to wonder whether much of the tension within Paul comes from these two dimensions of the same man. There was Paul the rabbinically trained interpreter of Scripture, and there was Paul the mystic attempting to understand an experience that had shattered the boundaries of his previous religious world.

I do not have to believe that everything Paul wrote was correct in order to believe that something profound happened to him. Mystical experience does not produce theological infallibility. A person can genuinely encounter a dimension of reality beyond ordinary consciousness and still interpret that experience through the intellectual, religious, and cultural categories already available to him. In fact, that is probably unavoidable. Paul did not suddenly cease being a first-century Jew after his experience of Christ. He continued thinking in categories of Adam, Abraham, Torah, sin, flesh, righteousness, sacrifice, election, judgment, resurrection, and the coming age. These were the conceptual tools available to him. The mistake Christianity eventually made, in my view, was treating Paul's interpretations of his mystical experience as though they were themselves the mystical experience. Theology became frozen into doctrine, and Paul's attempts to explain what he encountered became propositions Christians were required to believe.

Yet when I look beneath some of Paul's theological arguments, I find something much more interesting. I find a mystical Paul whose language occasionally seems to burst through the limitations of the theological structure surrounding it. "It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me." That is not merely doctrinal language. It is the language of participation. Paul repeatedly speaks of being "in Christ," of Christ being formed within us, of the Spirit dwelling within us, and of human beings being transformed from one degree of glory into another. In Romans 8, his vision expands beyond individual human salvation until creation itself is groaning toward liberation. In 1 Corinthians 15, the movement becomes even larger until Paul reaches the astonishing conclusion that God will eventually become "all in all." These passages sound less like the construction of a new institutional religion and more like glimpses of a mystical ontology.

From my present understanding, this is where Paul becomes extraordinarily interesting. I understand reality panentheistically. Everything exists within God, while God infinitely exceeds everything that exists. The visible emerges from an invisible ground of consciousness and potential. I understand the Logos not merely as a theological title exclusively belonging to Jesus but as the divine ordering and creative principle through which the invisible becomes visible, consciousness enters experience, and the divine is expressed within creation. Jesus, for me, uniquely and profoundly embodied this Logos-consciousness and revealed what conscious union with the divine could look like in a human life. When Paul speaks about Christ within us, therefore, I do not have to hear the later evangelical formula demanding intellectual belief about Jesus. I can hear something far more mystical: the divine reality revealed through Jesus is also present within us and is capable of becoming consciously realized.

Perhaps this is precisely why Paul's calling to the Gentiles was so important. Whatever else Paul got wrong, he shattered boundaries. Circumcision could no longer determine who belonged to God. Gentiles did not have to become Jews. Dietary practices, ethnicity, and ritual identity could no longer define participation in the divine community. Paul reached the extraordinary conclusion that in Christ there was neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. Something universal was emerging. Paul may not have understood all the implications of what he was saying, but once Christ was liberated from ethnicity, geography, Torah observance, and membership in a particular people, the door was opened to something much larger. Christ could eventually be understood cosmically.

This is where I can see Paul as part of an evolutionary movement of spiritual consciousness rather than as the final theological authority on Christianity. Evolution does not require perfection at every stage. It requires movement. Perhaps Paul's role was not to provide Christianity with a finished systematic theology for the next two thousand years. Perhaps his role was to move the Jesus experience beyond its original boundaries. As apostle to the Gentiles, Paul helped universalize something that had begun within the world of Second Temple Judaism. Christianity later turned Paul's insights into another system of boundaries, doctrines, creeds, exclusions, and requirements, but that does not mean the mystical impulse within Paul was responsible for everything later Christianity did with him.

I can therefore disagree with Paul without needing to dismiss him. I can recognize places where his rabbinic and apocalyptic inheritance seems stronger than his mystical insight. I can question his ideas about women, authority, sexuality, judgment, Adam, sin, and other matters without concluding that his entire experience was fraudulent. I can even recognize that some writings traditionally attributed to Paul may reflect later Pauline communities rather than Paul himself. Most importantly, I can distinguish revelation from interpretation. Paul may have encountered something real while sometimes misunderstanding what that encounter ultimately meant.

This distinction also helps me understand Paul's apparent internal conflicts. Romans 7 presents a human being divided against himself: "I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate." The religious self struggles against itself through law, guilt, desire, and condemnation. Then Romans 8 seems to open an entirely different landscape. There is indwelling Spirit, participation, transformation, freedom, creation itself moving toward liberation, and finally the magnificent conviction that nothing can separate us from the love of God. I sometimes wonder whether we are hearing two Pauls without actually having two different men. We are hearing the rabbinic Paul struggling to explain reality through inherited categories and the mystical Paul glimpsing something those categories cannot contain.

This also changes how I understand the accusation that Paul created Christianity rather than preserving the religion of Jesus. There is some truth hidden within the accusation. Paul certainly helped create the form Christianity eventually took, particularly as it moved into the Gentile world. But development is not necessarily corruption. Jesus himself did not leave a systematic theology. He proclaimed the Kingdom of God, told parables, healed people, challenged religious boundaries, spoke of the Father, and called people into transformed ways of seeing and living. Paul encountered what he believed was the risen Christ and attempted to understand the cosmic meaning of that encounter. Later generations interpreted Paul, just as Paul interpreted Christ. Augustine interpreted Paul. Luther interpreted Augustine and Paul. Evangelicalism inherited still more layers of interpretation. What many Christians today call "biblical Christianity" may therefore contain interpretations of interpretations of interpretations.

My task is not to recover some imaginary pristine Christianity and freeze it at another point in history. My understanding of an evolutionary universe does not permit that. If consciousness, creation, and human understanding are genuinely evolutionary, then spiritual understanding must also be capable of development. The Logos did not stop speaking in the first century. The same divine reality that could be encountered by Jesus, Paul, the mystics, and countless others continues to disclose itself through consciousness, experience, reason, science, contemplation, and the continuing evolution of human awareness.

I therefore no longer need either to defend Paul against every criticism or put him on trial. I can see him as a fellow traveler in the mystery: brilliant, conflicted, culturally conditioned, occasionally wrong, occasionally breathtaking, and transformed by an encounter he spent the rest of his life trying to understand. His rabbinic mind sometimes constrained his mystical vision, but his mystical vision also repeatedly broke through those constraints. Perhaps that is precisely what makes Paul valuable to me today. He reminds me that revelation can be larger than the person receiving it, that an experience of the divine can contain implications the experiencer does not yet comprehend, and that spiritual evolution can move through imperfect human beings. Paul may not have reached the Christianity I now embrace, but perhaps some of his deepest mystical insights helped open the road that eventually made such a Christianity imaginable.