Quotes about Paul

Paul declares that 'flesh and blood cannot inherit God's kingdom.' He doesn't mean that physicality will be abolished. 'Flesh and blood' is a technical term for that which is corruptible, transient, heading for death. The contrast is not between what we call physical and what we call nonphysical but between corruptible physicality, on the one hand, and incorruptible physicality, on the other.

The radical insight of St. Paul into what it means to be human, and what it means to have the overwhelming love of God take hold of you, corresponds in quite an obvious way to what most people know about what makes someone more or less livable-with. And livable-with-ness, though of course it contains a large subjective element, is not a bad rule of thumb for what it might mean to be truly human.

Paul's response was to quote the prophets once more, this time his regular text, Isaiah 49: "I have set you for a light to the nations, so that you can be salvation-bringers to the end of the earth.

Paul is not only urging and requesting but actually embodying what he elsewhere calls 'the ministry of reconciliation'. God was in the Messiah, reconciling the world to himself, he says in 2 Corinthians 5.19; now, we dare to say, God was in Paul reconciling Onesimus and Philemon.

The point is this. Paul's letters are highly energetic. Filling translations of his works with stodgy, chewy words and phrases will give the reader indigestion. They may be 'accurate' in one sense, but they are inaccurate in another. Such challenges mean that translation remains exciting, demanding and never-ending.

For Paul and all the other early Christians, what mattered was not "saved souls" being rescued from the world and taken to a distant "heaven," but the coming together of heaven and earth themselves in a great act of cosmic renewal in which human bodies were likewise being renewed to take their place within that new world.

Second, the means by which this goal is attained is precisely the "forgiveness of sins." If, as Paul implies in 2:15, the objection of Jews (or Jewish Messiah believers) to the inclusion of Gentiles is that they are "Gentile sinners," then this objection is overturned precisely because the Messiah "gave himself for our sins.

Sin," for Paul, is therefore not simply the breaking of moral codes, though it can be recognized in that way. It is, far more deeply, the missing of the mark of genuine humanness through the failure of worship or rather through worshipping idols rather than the true God.

But Paul's vision of God's love, rising here like the sun on a clear summer's morning, shines through all the detail that has gone before. You need to wake up early, to get out of bed, and to throw back the curtains, to see it; that's what the previous four chapters are about. But now that we have done all that, the view is here for us to enjoy. And to be dazzled by. God's love has done everything we could need, everything we shall need.

Learning how to think as the Messiah had thought, Paul insisted, was the only way to radical unity in the church, and it was also the secret of how to live as "pure and spotless children of God in the middle of a twisted and depraved generation

In fact, the resistance to such claims may well come from the constant impulse to resist the Lordship of Jesus, the one through whom it is accomplished. Paul lived in a world where other 'lords' reigned supreme, and resented alternative candidates for their position. So do we. ROMANS

He was a Jew who believed in the goodness of the original creation and the intention of the Creator to renew his world. His gospel of "salvation" was about Israel's Messiah "inheriting the world," as had been promised in the Psalms. What God had done in and through Jesus was, from Paul's perspective, the launching of a heaven-and-earth movement, not the offer of a new "otherworldly" hope.