Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

a religion of inner self-discovery rather than of rescue, of private devotion rather than public witness.

Phinehas killed the idolatrous man, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness; in other words, God established a covenant with him.

The use of Romans 1–4 in popular teaching today to declare universal human sinfulness and “justification” by grace alone and through faith alone is fine as far as it goes. Sadly, it routinely shrinks what Paul is actually saying in these chapters and fails to see that they are only one part of a larger argument and do not make full sense without the material that then follows. Romans is not written to explain how people may be saved. It describes that, to be sure, vividly and compellingly, but it does so in order to highlight the faithfulness of God and, with that, the challenges facing the covenant people. Those were the themes the Roman church urgently needed to understand.

He wants the members of the Roman churches to respect one another across these differences. (We note, to ward off a very different problem in today’s contemporary Western churches, that this supposed “tolerance” does not extend to all areas of behavior, as the closing lines of chapter 13 and the equivalent sections of other letters make abundantly clear.)

We simply do not know what happened to the money. Reading Paul’s letters, watching him carefully organize the collection and its equally careful transportation, we are like people watching all but the last ten minutes of a great sporting event on television, when a sudden power outage stops us from finding out who won.

His churches had been taught to think theologically at a depth far beyond what was implied in the rather simplistic “letter.” He must have felt like a serious musician who, having played in top concert halls around the world, returned home and was invited to admire someone playing a few old tunes in the pub down the road. He could understand and respect what they were saying, but he knew a larger world.

At this, the high priest ordered him to be struck on the mouth. As in the trial of Jesus,24 this was a standard if violent way of saying symbolically “You ought not to be speaking in your own defense, because you are obviously guilty. You should shut your mouth, and if you don’t, we’ll shut it for you.”

More than symbolic lol

There will be a resurrection of both the righteous and the unrighteous (none of Paul’s letters make this point, since they focus on the resurrection of the righteous only).

by using a saying from the very pagan traditions from which people must turn away!

He was much more afraid of not being true to the gospel than of any consequences a “bold” proclamation might have had.

We are left, like some postmodern novelists, with the possibility of writing two or even three endings to the story and leaving readers to decide.

Those who like their religion, or indeed their friendships, served at medium temperature may find Paul’s personality hard to take: at once eager and vulnerable, both bold and (in his own words) “in your face” and then liable to serious self-doubt (“Was it all for nothing?”). One might suppose that, as a friend, he was, as we say, high maintenance, though the reward would be high performance.

to establish and maintain Jew-plus-Gentile communities, worshipping the One God in and through Jesus his son and in the power of the spirit, ahead of the catastrophe.

This is why Paul insisted, in letter after letter, on the unity of the church across all traditional boundaries.

The Western churches have, by and large, put Paul’s message within a medieval notion that rejected the biblical vision of heaven and earth coming together at last. The Middle Ages changed the focus of attention away from “earth” and toward two radically different ideas instead, “heaven” and “hell,” often with a temporary stage (“purgatory”) before “heaven.” Paul’s life-changing and world-transforming gospel was then made to serve this quite different agenda, that is, that believing the gospel was the way to escape all that and “go to heaven.”

The point of being human, after all, was never simply to be a passive inhabitant of God’s world. As far as Paul was concerned, the point of being human was to be an image-bearer, to reflect God’s wisdom and order into the world and to reflect the praises of creation back to God.

Humans were therefore made to stand at the threshold of heaven and earth—like an “image” in a temple, no less—and to be the conduit through which God’s life would come to earth and earth’s praises would rise to God.

those who are grasped by grace in the gospel and who bear witness to that in their loyal belief in the One God, focused on Jesus, are not merely beneficiaries, recipients of God’s mercy; they are also agents. They are poems in which God is addressing his world, and, as poems are designed to do, they break open existing ways of looking at things and spark the mind to imagine a different way to be human.

But we will miss what Paul’s “justification” is really all about. It isn’t about a moralistic framework in which the only question that matters is whether we humans have behaved ourselves and so amassed a store of merit (“righteousness”) and, if not, where we can find such a store, amassed by someone else on our behalf. It is about the vocational framework in which humans are called to reflect God’s image in the world and about the rescue operation whereby God has, through Jesus, set humans free to do exactly that.

For Paul, as for all devout Jews, the major problem of the world was idolatry.

What he did not share, as he thought through his tradition in the light of Jesus and the spirit, was the idea that the people of Israel, as they stood, constituted the answer to this problem—as though all one had to do was to become a Jew and try to keep the Torah, and all would be well not only with Israel, but with the world. Paul knew that view, and he firmly rejected it.

Israel too had its own brand of idolatry.

For Paul, justification was about God’s declaration that this or that person was a member of the single family promised to Abraham—which meant that, though “ungodly” because they were Gentiles, such people had been “justified,” declared to be in the right, to be within God’s covenant family, by God’s overthrow of the enslaving powers, by his forgiveness of sins, and by the powerful cleansing work of the spirit.

the faith by which one believes, that is, the actual human trust, the personal response to the message of the gospel.

Paul took the stance he now did neither because he was some kind of a “liberal”—whatever that might have meant in his day!—nor because he was making pragmatic compromises to try to lure Gentiles into his communities, nor, to say it again, because he secretly hated his own culture and identity. It was all because of the Messiah: “I have been crucified with the Messiah.

As a companion, he must have been exhilarating when things were going well and exasperating when they weren’t. As an opponent, he could cause some people to contemplate murder as their only recourse.

He was the sort of person through whom other people are changed, changed so that they will themselves take forward the same work with as much of the same energy as they can muster.

But that unity, a top-down uniformity in which diversity was welcomed as long as it didn’t threaten the absolute sovereignty of Caesar, was always creaky, and often ugly. The “diversity” was, after all, still seen in strictly hierarchical terms: men over women, free over slaves, Romans over everybody else. Rebels were ruthlessly suppressed. “They make a wilderness,” sighed the Briton Calgacus, “and they call it ‘peace.’”19

they were discovering at the same time that Rome, after all, could not really deliver on its promises.

When the new communities spoke of a different Kyrios, one whose sovereignty was gained through humility and suffering rather than wealth and conquest, many must have found that attractive, not simply for what we would call “religious” reasons, but precisely for what they might call “political” ones.

How could a new and demanding standard of behavior ever be attractive? In the ancient world, however, this was good news for many, especially for those—women, the poor, ethnic minorities, slaves, children—who were most vulnerable to the normal patterns of pagan behavior.

against the expectations of our own day, the Christian message provided a much better prospect for women than the pagan world could.

This point has often been missed when people have read the phrase “good works” as meaning simply “the performance of moral rules,” especially when that in turn has been played off against “justification by faith alone.” Morals matter, faith matters, but that isn’t the point here. Paul’s emphasis here is all about communities through whose regular practice the surrounding world is made a better place.

crucifixion of Jesus, their belief that on the cross he won the victory over all the dark powers. That wasn’t just a theological theory about an abstract “atonement.” It was the necessary foundation for the lives of the communities in which they lived and worked.

Mammon, Mars, and Aphrodite had been shown up as impostors. Caesar himself was not the ultimate Lord.

Theology is the backbone of a healthy church.

When the church abandons the theological task, with its exegetical roots in the work of Paul and his colleagues, we should not be surprised if unity, holiness, and the care for the poor are sidelined as well.