If his persecution of the Church, which he had thought 100 per cent right, was in fact 100 per cent wrong, and if God revealed Christ and called Paul despite such a fundamental sin, it was clear that God’s grace was not given on the basis of human worth. That was an unnerving discovery, since it was normally (and understandably) imagined that God’s best gifts were differentially distributed according to the worth of the recipients. But if God’s favour was given without respect for worth, it was not limited, Paul came to see, by any ethnic criteria.
