Paul: Christianity’s Premier Apostolic Mystic

Introduction

[Paul’s] letters contain some things that are hard to understand . . . (2 Pet 3:16)

My interest in the Christian mystics began in 1959 when I was an electrical engineering student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and read my first mystical text, St. John of the Cross’ Dark Night of the Soul. The book stirred me deeply and I never lost my initial conviction that John of the Cross and other mystics of the Christian tradition are of immense importance to anyone interested in living a deeper Christian life.

My 1960 entrance into the Society of Jesus further intensified my fascination with the mystics. Within two months I had completed Ignatius’ thirty-day retreat and experienced firsthand the healing and transforming power of his famous Spiritual Exercises. Despite my enthusiasm for the Exercises, my reading list did not include anything by or about St. Ignatius of Loyola. My master of novices, Father Thomas G. O’Callaghan asked: What do you have against Ignatius? His ironic question was one of the great graces of my life. I had nothing against Ignatius, but simply needed guidance.

In 1969 I traveled to Germany to begin theological studies as one of Karl Rahner’s doctoral students. My dissertation attempted to translate the mystical wisdom of St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises into a contemporary framework by using Rahner’s transcendental method, which culminated in my 1987 book, Ignatius Loyola the Mystic. It argued that popular and even scholarly emphasis on Ignatius’ apostolic successes as well as a mistaken view of him as a reformer, an ascetic, and an advocate of discursive, methodical prayer have obscured Ignatius the apostolic mystic.

Throughout my Jesuit studies from 1962 to 1969, I read many anthologies of the Christian mystics.¹ In 1975 I began teaching at Boston College, taught courses on Christian mysticism, and published a small book, What Are They Saying about Mysticism, then Christian Mysticism: The Future of a Tradition, followed by An Anthology of Christian Mysticism, later Soundings in the Christian Mystical Tradition, and recently, in conjunction with Father Joseph H. Wong, OSB Cam, The Christology and Mystical Theology of Karl Rahner. I owe much to the definitive multi-volume works of the premier scholar of the Western mystical tradition, the University of Chicago Professor Emeritus Bernard McGinn.

During my theological studies at the old Woodstock in Maryland, I was blessed to have the extraordinary professor and world-class scholar on the apostle Paul, Father Joseph Fitzmyer, SJ. He published the Anchor Bible Commentary on 1 Corinthians when in his nineties. Later on, the monumental works of the British scripture scholar N. T. Wright and his dialogue partners only deepened my profound fascination with St. Paul, Christianity’s premier apostolic mystic.

Unlike the other apostles, Paul had not lived with Jesus for three years. Nevertheless, because of his encounter with the risen Jesus on the Damascus road, his felt-knowledge of mystery of God in Christ made him not only an apostle but also Christianity’s earliest apostolic mystic and a mystical theologian par excellence. I mean by a Christian mystic someone who is explicitly and directly conscious of the immediate or direct presence of the Trinity and/or Christ. I understand mystical experience not only as discrete, individual experiences but also as experience in the sense that an experienced musician instinctively knows and loves music. Thus, I prefer to speak of mystical consciousness and the mystical life. In other words, this present book focuses on Paul’s mystical worldview, his mystical horizon, the lens through which he comprehended that God consummated Israel’s history through the sending of Jesus-Messiah² and the Holy Spirit. In fact, one reason why Paul’s epistles often make for such difficult reading is that he was rethinking the Jewish Scriptures in terms of Jesus-Messiah and the Holy Spirit. This zealous Jewish Pharisee grew to understand Jesus-Messiah as Judaism fulfilled and perfected.

A theological tradition, beginning in earnest with Thomas Aquinas and enduring almost to the present day, attributed to the proto-man Adam and Moses the highest degree of mystical consciousness possible in this life. This tradition argues that if that were true for Old Testament figures, then it must also be true of St. Paul in the New Testament. One of the earliest usages of the word mystical referred to how Jesus-Messiah is revealed in the Jewish scriptures.³ Did not Jesus say to the Emmaus disciples: How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the scriptures concerning himself (Luke 24:24).

I maintain that the light from the face of the risen Christ, whom Paul encountered on the Damascus road, and what he wrote about this light in 2 Corinthians 4:6 (For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ) is the mystical light in which Paul wrote his letters and saw his call to be Jesus-Messiah’s apostle.

Although Paul clearly had mystical experiences in the sense of distinct, transitory, transformative events, the term experience lends itself to a misunderstanding of mysticism as particular feelings or sensible perceptions that are too easily separated from understanding, judging, deciding, and loving—that which forms the full range of the human person as a self-conscious and free subject. Thus, I claim that Paul’s mysticism—as in all genuine Christian mysticism—became the center of his life, which engendered in him new ways of knowing and loving that also involved a transformative decision about how he would live. His mystical worldview was nothing less than the triune God and/or Jesus-Messiah, which was the horizon against which Paul’s knew, comprehended, and loved everything else. One might say that the Jewish Shema, Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one—but rethought in the light of Jesus-Messiah and the Holy Spirit—was what Paul ultimately experienced in all his experience, what was ultimately understood in all his understanding, what was ultimately judged in all his judgments, and what was ultimately decided upon in all his decisions.

I regard Paul as the world’s greatest missionary, one whom scholars estimate walked over fifteen hundred miles to plant the flag of the Lord Jesus in Roman colonies where Caesar was supposedly lord. And I would emphasize Paul’s numerous and dangerous trips by ship. In his duties as God’s messenger, the Lukan Paul is sent specifically to the synagogues of the Roman world. When Paul was first converted, for example, he immediately entered the synagogues in order to report that Jesus is God’s Son (Acts 9:20). This regular engagement in the synagogues prevailed throughout Paul’s career, becoming what Luke called his custom (Acts 17:2). Everywhere Paul went, so it seems in Luke’s account, he went first to the synagogue—not to the idolatrous temples nor the pagan forums. There, in the synagogues, he found receptive ears among Jews and God-fearing gentiles (Acts 13:5–14; 14:1; 16:13–14; 17:2–17; 18:19; 19:8). I suggest that one google a map that illustrates Paul’s journeys, which makes for fascinating study.

Paul’s mystical charism also revealed itself in other ways. Acts of healing and exorcisms went hand-in-hand with his apostolic ministry. For example, God did extraordinary miracles through Paul, so that even handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched him were taken to the sick, and their illnesses were cured and the evil spirits left them. Some Jews who went around driving out evil spirits tried to invoke the name of the Lord Jesus over those who were demon-possessed. They would say, ‘In the name of the Jesus whom Paul preaches, I command you to come out’ (Acts 19:1–13). This indicates that Paul was well-known both as a Spirit-filled healer and an exorcist. Like his Master, Paul made the lame walk (Acts 14:8–10), raised the dead (Acts 20:11–12), cured the fevered (Acts 28:8), and healed various other ailments (Acts 19:11–12; 28:9). He proved himself to be a capable discerner of both healing-signs and of plague-signs, as when he blinded his prophetic opponent Elymas, the magician (Acts 13:12).

It should be pointed out that according to Luke’s account of Paul’s ministry, neither letter-writing nor theological exposition were central to the apostle’s career.⁴ The Lukan Paul, as a matter of fact, was not much of a thinker at all. Rather, he was primarily a doer: a wonderworker, a messenger, and a seer. These seemingly forgotten modes of Paul’s ministry, I would maintain, in large part defined the apostle’s character long before his epistles were collected and meticulously scrutinized by churchmen and academics alike. While these letters are undoubtedly the product of a powerful mystical mind, their theological reflection represent a mere snapshot of the apostle’s output. The Paul of history, unlike the Paul of the church and the academy, was, in the first place, a man of startling deeds, a man with a message from God, and a man guided by ecstatic encounters with the divine. In short, he was Christianity’s premier apostolic mystic.

As someone who has spent many years studying and praying over Paul’s writings, I resonate with what St. John Chrysostom wrote about him:

As I keep hearing the Epistles of the blessed Paul read . . . whenever we are celebrating the memorials of the holy martyrs, gladly do I enjoy the spiritual trumpet, and get stirred and warmed with desire at recognizing the voice so dear to me, and seem to fancy him all but present to my sight, and behold him conversing with me. But I grieve and am pained, that all people do not know this man, as much as they ought to know him; but some are so far ignorant of him, as not even to know for certainty the number of his Epistles. And this comes not of incapacity, but of their not wishing to be continually conversing with this blessed man. For it is not through any natural readiness and sharpness of wit that even I am acquainted with as much as I do know, if I do know anything, but only to a continual cleaving to this man, and an earnest affection towards him.⁵

Martin Luther considered justification by faith alone to be Paul’s central teaching—a view that has endured in some quarters to the present day. However, what Paul wrote in the first chapter of his Epistle to the Romans proclaims otherwise: Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God—the gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures regarding his Son, who as to his earthly life was a descendant of David, and who through the Spirit of holiness was appointed the Son of God in power by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord. Thus, Paul understood the gospel as centering on the bodily resurrection of Jesus-Messiah who explicitly designated Paul as an apostle to preach this gospel. This has nothing to do with the later faith-works Reformation controversy. And, in Paul’s way of thinking, faith is the response of the whole person to this entire gospel. It is both the faith through which one believes and the faith that one believes.

Moreover, given the contemporary popular and even scholarly skewed opinions on what constitutes Christian mysticism and the often contentious contemporary approaches to the apostle Paul, I plan to explain what authentic Christian mysticism really is and why the term apostolic mystic is an appropriate designation for the apostle Paul. I concede that the fairly recent and contemporary prodigious work on both Christian mysticism and also the apostle Paul has made this book rather difficult.

Yet, no one has produced anything substantial on the apostolic mystic Paul since Albert Schweitzer’s now outdated 1931 volume.⁶ I am also keenly aware of what one reads in 2 Peter 3:16: There are some things in [Paul’s letters] hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures. So, within a generation, people were grumbling that Paul was sometimes hard to understand and some were taking him the wrong way. All the same, it is no accident that many of the great moments in church history—think of Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Barth—have come about through fresh engagement with Paul’s work.

When asked why Paul, with only seventy or eighty pages of text to his name in the average Bible, has been more widely read and had far greater influence than the other great letter writers of antiquity—for example, Cicero or Seneca—and for that matter the great public intellectuals and founders of the movements of his day and ours, the answer is clear: it is his range of writing, from the urgent to the appealing, from the prophetic to the poetic, and from intellectual rigor to passionate advocacy. The man who could write Philemon and Romans side-by-side was a man for every occasion.

What transformed Saul the zealous Pharisee into St. Paul the apostolic mystic? Who, apart from Jesus-Messiah, was more formative for recasting the Jewish worldview around messianic hopes and establishing kingdom-centered Christian communities in the West than Paul? Who, apart from maybe Peter, was more influential in founding churches across the Roman empire—communities that were distinguished by their devotion to the Lord Jesus (not Caesar) and committed to a radically countercultural way of life—than Paul? Who, apart from maybe Irenaeus, was more formidable when it came to defending the gospel against being diluted and adulterated by dissident groups than Paul? Who has written some of the world’s masterpieces on Jesus-Messiah, love, and other topics? Paul! Who was Christianity’s premier apostolic mystic? Again, the apostle Paul!

What was Paul trying to do? What made him do it? Why did he keep on going back to the synagogue, even though this got him beaten time and time again? Why did he continue with his message on the gentiles, even though his fellow Jews and pagans alike thought that he was a crazy Jew and wanted to run him out of town? Why did he carry on relentlessly, with his apparent desire to be in several places at once, to write to five churches at once, to explain and to cajole, to teach and to proclaim, to travel and travel and travel some more? And on one occasion he became so drained of energy that he claimed to have despaired of life itself. What was it that eventually regenerated his faith and hope? What assessment can we make of his brilliant mind and passionate heart? Why did the movement he started, against all odds, become in a fairly short time the church we see in the fourth and fifth centuries? What was it about this busy, volatile man, that, despite everything, seems to have been so effective.

Paul always emphasized Jesus-Messiah as the shocking fulfillment of Israel’s hopes. As a genuinely human being, Jesus was nothing less than the true image and embodiment of Israel’s God. In addition, without leaving Jewish monotheism, Paul and his Jesus followers worshipped and invoked Jesus as Lord and the Holy Spirit within, not alongside, the service of the living and true God. Jesus was the definitive reason why all idols, all rival lords, should be forsaken. In all history, only Paul ever wrote that, compared to Jesus, all else can be considered pure excrement.

Jesus was not only Paul’s starting point but also his goal. He never wavered in his conviction that Jesus would descend from heaven, which is not in the sky, but is rather God’s dimension of present reality. Jesus would come from heaven to earth in order to complete the already begun task of filling earth with the life of heaven, God’s sphere. God’s plan had always been to unite all things in heaven and on earth in the ultimate temple, Jesus-Messiah and his Holy Spirit.

Paul believed that Israel’s God, having abandoned the temple at the time of the Babylonian exile and never having fulfilled his promise to return in his invisible and powerful glory, had suddenly, shockingly, and disruptively revealed himself in Jesus-Messiah, breaking in upon an unready world and an unready people. He believed in the new creation, a coming great transformation that would take place at Jesus’ return or his reappearing, the time when heaven and earth would come together at last. This explains both Paul’s identity and why he succeeded. He not only advocated but also made possible through his person and writings a new way of life, a new kind of community. Because of the gospel, the good news of Jesus-Messiah, the old barriers between Jew and Greek, master and slave, male and female—I would add also between people of all colors and races—were to be abolished in Jesus-Messiah.

It was also because in Jesus-Messiah the promises of Psalm 2 had come true—that God would set his anointed king over the rulers of the nations. That means that Paul’s work must be regarded just as much as social and political as it is theological and religious. Every time Paul expounded justification, it formed part of his argument that in Jesus-Messiah there was a single family composed of believing Jews and believing gentiles, master and slave, male and female—a family that demonstrated to the world that there was a new way of being human.

One should also notice how Paul stressed and even celebrated the sufferings that he and others would indeed endure because of their loyalty to Jesus. He pioneered the idea of a suffering apostleship through which