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3.7 - A History of Christianity in the Apostolic Age
The Christianity of Paul
Oneness with Christ
Thus had Jesus, who appeared to Paul on the way to Damascus, been delivered from the supreme evil, death, and attained that life for which Paul longed so earnestly, and to secure which he had struggled all in vain.
But why had Jesus the Messiah done all this? Why had he come down from heaven, assume human flesh, suffered and died, and returned to the place from whence he came? But one answer was possible to Paul in the light of his own experience, and under the pressure of his own need. Christ had done what he did not in order to free himself, but to free others from the burden of sin and death, and to give them that life with God which he himself enjoyed.
There can be no doubt that in the vision which broke upon Paul's startled gaze on the road to Damascus, the risen Jesus appeared to him, not merely as one who should usher in the promised kingdom, but also, and especially, as one who should break the bondage of death and give his people life.
Struggling, defeated, despairing, he saw in it the promise of his own deliverance, for which he had so earnestly longed, but which had seemed utterly unattainable. Had the vision not meant this to Paul, it would have left him in only greater despair than before.
To receive a revelation of the Messiah whom he and his countrymen had been expecting, would not have helped him, for into the Messianic kingdom only the righteous could enter, and he was painfully conscious of his own unrighteousness.
Indeed, to have revealed to him as the Christ the one whom he had himself been blaspheming and attacking could mean only a sense of deeper condemnation. Such a revelation must mean judgement not mercy, a curse and not a blessing. That it meant mercy and blessing to Paul, and that it resulted not in terror and despair, but in his immediate and joyful conversion to Christian discipleship, was due to the fact that in the very vision itself was given him an entirely new conception of the office of the Messiah.
Like the majority of his countrymen, he had doubtless thought of him as coming not to save his people from their sins, but to bring a righteous people their reward. But in the Messiah who appeared to him on the way to Damascus, Paul beheld his savior and deliverer, and there was born anew hope in his heart, the hope of eternal life which he had completely lost under the stress of the spiritual conflict through which he had been passing.
No wonder that his cry of despair was followed by the exultant exclamation, "I thank God, through Jesus Christ our Lord"; [Rom. 7:25] and no wonder that he could write to the Corinthians, with his mind upon the great event that had taken place more than twenty years before, "It is God who shined in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." [2 Cor. 4:6]
But how was the action of the Messiah to effect that deliverance of which Paul thus felt assured? How was Paul himself, and how were others, to benefit by all that he had done in their behalf? It was in answering this question that Paul departed most widely from the thought of all his predecessors and contemporaries; that he showed himself most independent of outside influence and revealed most clearly his religious individuality and originality.
Christ saves a man, he says, by entering and taking up his abode within him, by binding him indissolubly to himself, so that it is no longer he that lives, but Christ that lives in him, so that whatever Christ does he does, and whatever he does Christ does.
[Paul's conception of the significance of Christ's death and of the union between the risen Christ and the believer, though the fruit, as we have seen, of his own religious experience, was yet not without confirmation in the teaching of Christ himself, and there can be little doubt that that teaching contributed to the clearness and certainty of the conception. Christ had more than once referred to his death not as an unavoidable evil, but as a positive and lasting benefit to his followers, and his identification of the bread and wine, of which his disciples partook in the Last Super, with his own body and blood, might possibly seem to furnish a warrant for the belief in the real and actual oneness between the believer and his Lord. With Christ's utterance concerning his death and with the occurrences connected with the Last Supper, Paul may not have been acquainted at the time of his conversion, but he must have learned of them very soon thereafter, and they may well have exercised an appreciable influence upon the formation of his views; cf: 1 Cor. 15:3, 10:16 sq., 6:23 sq. It is true that he interpreted them very differently from Christ's immediate disciples; but the fact that he found in them a confirmation of the fruits of his religious experience, can hardly be questioned.]
[It can hardly be questioned, moreover, that the universal belief of the early Christians in the presence and influence of the Holy Spirit, with which of course Paul must have been familiar even before his conversion, had its influence in the formation of his views. He could not fail to see in the testimony of others to the presence of the Holy Spirit, a confirmation of the own experience of Christ's indwelling, and the identification of Christ and the Holy Spirit must thus have been all the more easy and natural to him.]
Used by permission of the publisher.
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