Quotes about Paul

But from the start the early Christians believed that the resurrection body, though it would certainly be a body in the sense of a physical object, would be a transformed body, a body whose material, created from the old material, would have new properties. That is what Paul means by the "spiritual body": not a body made out of nonphysical spirit, but a physical body animated by the Spirit, a Spirit-driven body if you like: still what we would call physical but differently animated.

One Corinthians 15, one of Paul's longest sustained discussions and the climax of the whole letter, is about the creator God remaking the creation—not abandoning it, as Platonists of all sorts, including the gnostics, would have wanted.

Since Paul knew that his own hard and bitter heart had been changed by God's grace, he also knew that there was nobody this side of the grave who could not in principle be similarly reached and changed.

Paul saw himself living at the ultimate turning point of history. His announcement of Jesus in that culture at that moment was itself, he would have claimed, part of the long-term divine plan.

Rereading some of these writers, one is tempted to say that if anyone needed help to struggle against some of the unfortunate things they committed to paper, it was not Paul, but some of his twentieth-century interpreters.

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.

Sanders argued, basically, that the normal Christian, and especially Protestant, readings of Paul were seriously flawed, because they attributed to first-century Judaism theological views which belonged rather to medieval Catholicism. Once we described Judaism accurately, Sanders argued, we were forced to rethink Paul's critique of it, and his whole positive theology in its turn.

God's kingdom had already been launched through the events of Jesus's life. Unless we get this firmly in our heads, we will never understand the inner dynamic of Paul's mission.

Paul is the classic example of the early Christian who has woven resurrection so thoroughly into his thinking and practice that if you take it away the whole thing unravels in your hands.

Only those who have tried to understand and expound the Bible, and especially Paul as a man of his own day, only those who have happily escaped the dangers which threaten us on these two sides (exposition and application), are entitled to cast the first stone.

So when Paul says he is "not ashamed of the gospel," he is saying that a Christian worldview will not let you down. It will not disappoint. 69 Christianity fulfills the human hunger for a unified, integrated worldview to live by. It has the intellectual resources to provide a holistic, internally consistent guide to life.

apologists we are never out simply to establish an idea or to prove a theory. We stand as witnesses to a Person who is love, and out of our own love for him we are introducing others to being known and loved by him, so that they can know and love him in their turn. Without love, as St. Paul has told us, apologists too are only noisy gongs and clanging cymbals.