Saint Paul was Improvising
The gap between "Paul faithfully preached Christ" and "Every sentence he wrote was perfect."
Not-particularly-hot-take: I have a love-hate relationship with the letters attributed to Saint Paul in the New Testament.
Paul’s letters contain some of the most compelling words every written about faith, love, grace, and mercy. They also contain language that has been used to defend slavery, marital rape, violent dictatorship and every kind of misogyny.
One of the most famous responses to Paul’s letters comes from Howard Thurman’s grandmother, Nancy Ambrose, who would ask him to read the bible to her when he was a child. She would ask to hear from Isaiah, the Gospels, the psalms — but never Paul’s letters.1 Years later, he got up the courage to ask her why:
“During the days of slavery,” she said, “the master’s minister would occasionally hold services for the slaves. Old man McGhee was so mean that he would not let a Negro minister preach to his slaves. Always the white minister used as his text something from Paul. At least three or four times a year he used as a text: ‘Slaves, be obedient to them that are your masters, as unto Christ.’ Then he would go on to show how it was God’s will that we were slaves, and how, if we were good and happy slaves, God would bless us. I promised my Maker that if I ever learned to read and if freedom ever came, I would not read that part of the Bible.”2
At the same time there were Christians, including people who’d been enslaved, who continued to read Paul, and even found comfort and liberation in his writing. As Lisa M. Bowens uncovers in her African American Readings of Paul, many early black American preachers and writers used Paul’s letters as evidence of a God who stood clearly and unambiguously on the side of people who’d been enslaved, whose words affirmed their agency and dignity in a way white slaveowners worked to extinguish.
Thus abolitionist writer David Walker, using language seeped in Pauline quotes, writes:
What can the American preachers and people take God to be? Do they believe his words? If they do, do they believe that he will be mocked [Gal. 6:7]? Or do they believe, because they are whites and we blacks, that God will have respect to them? Did not God make us all as it seemed best to himself?
What right, then, has one of us, to despise another, and to treat him cruel, on account of his colour, which none, but the God who made it can alter? Can there be a greater absurdity in nature, and particularly in a free republican country? But the Americans, having introduced slavery among them, their hearts have become almost seared, as with an hot iron, and God has nearly given them up to believe a lie in preference to the truth!!! [1 Tim. 4:2; Rom. 1:25].
And I am awfully afraid that pride, prejudice, avarice and blood, will, before long prove the final ruin of this happy republic, or land of liberty!!!! Can any thing be a greater mockery of religion than the way in which it is conducted by the Americans? … Will the Lord suffer this people to go on much longer, taking his holy name in vain? Will he not stop them, PREACHERS and all? O Americans! Americans!! I call God [2 Cor. 1:23]—I call angels—I call men, to witness, that your DESTRUCTION is at hand, and will be speedily consummated unless you REPENT3.
There is a stark contrast here between Walker’s and the white preacher’s readings of Paul. The preacher found a couple of passages where Paul supported the institution of slavery, and used them to declare that slavery was the will of God. Walker, on the other hand, understood that the gospel Paul preached and the Christ he worshiped were incompatible with slavery on a very fundamental level, and so he rightly pursued the cause of freedom.
But how does this work? How can you argue that Paul’s own words are incompatible with the gospel he preaches? Didn’t Paul know his own gospel, and can’t we therefore assume his writing is compatible with it? (Anyone who’s participated in Christian conversations on women’s rights or LGBT affirmation has heard this question a million times.)
I don’t have a completely settled theology of scripture, and I’m not convinced that it’s healthy to have one. The bible is a strange and surprising book, after all, and I think it’s important to leave room for it to surprise us. But I do think this contradiction goes away if we think of Paul as a human being, a man who saw Jesus on the road to Damascus and spent the rest of his days working out the implications of this life-shattering event.
Think about your own walk with God: surely there are things you see now that you didn’t see at the beginning! When I first experienced — truly experienced — the love of God, I did not suddenly understand everything about Christian life, because there’s a huge gap between “God loves everyone” and “here’s how to sustainably budget to give as much money as you can to people who could use it more than you” or “systemic racism is a stain on white American Christianity and God is really angry about it.” I understood the gospel, but I did not (and still don’t) understand all of its implications.
You can see this sort of progression in Paul’s writing as well. If you read Galatians and then Romans, it’s clear that Paul has figured out some stuff he wasn’t sure about before! His corrections in 1 Thessalonians indicates that, when he originally preached to this church, he might have been too confident about how quickly Jesus would return. And of course there are moments when Paul, who admonishes his followers to be kind and think only about heavenly things, makes crass jokes hoping his opponents will castrate themselves.
Why? Because this is what it looks like when God works through people. The people God chooses do not suddenly become spitting images of Christ. The Patriarchs in Genesis lie to everyone they meet. King David followed God’s will for a bit and then raped Bathsheba. So even as Paul passes on the gospel he heard from Christ and clearly sees its relevance to e.g. the church’s mistreatment of Gentiles, his writing still contains blind spots and missed opportunities because it’s still written by a human being. You can see this particularly clearly in the ethical parts of his letters, where he’s struggling to address a boatload of practical questions of “how to run a church” as they come up and his reasoning typically sounds less like “this is universal divine law” and more like “here’s what I’m coming up with on the fly based on what I know.” There is much to be gained from his wisdom, but I think we lose something when we pretend his off-the-cuff answers are perfect divine commands.
This is why Paul’s writing on slavery is so weird and contradictory. He’s clearly starting to put some pieces together: his admonitions that masters must treat their slaves kindly were at least somewhat counter-cultural at the time, and his letter to Philemon shows signs of recognizing that the relationship is unjust, at least when it involves someone he knows personally. But he never quite confronts the main question, and so our earliest written sources describing Christ’s radically liberating gospel also contain a passive acceptance of one of the most sinful systems imaginable, and it takes isn’t until the work of later writers (from Augustine to Frederick Douglass) that we see a fully Christ-like perspective.
His writing on women has a similar tack. Throughout his writing, Paul recognizes the image of God, and the ministries of teaching and preaching, in specific women who he’s met. He affirms Phoebe in her role as deacon, Junia in her role as apostle, Priscilla as a leader of a church in Rome, Nympha as the leader of a church in Laodicea, and numerous others. But he’s writing from the perspective of a man in a patriarchal society, and his love and respect for individual women never manages to shift his underlying biases. His offhand comments about women as a group tend to be strange and poorly argued, requiring women to wear head coverings “because of the angels” or banning women from authority “because Eve was deceived first”.
In many of these cases he even contradicts himself — in 1 Corinthians 11 he gives rules for women praying or prophesying (in the most literal possible sense teaching the word of God) in church, but later in the same letter he insists that “women should keep silent in the churches.” It takes heroic effort to read this as eternal, universal truth or a nuanced picture of gender relations we need to accept every piece of, when the text so clearly reflects a man who hadn’t yet grappled with the implications of his own gospel for his view of women saying whatever pops into his head.
The point isn’t whether or not this “redeems” Paul. The blood of Christ does that, not human attempts to pretend every single work he produced is “perfect”. Neither is it to place ourselves as the ultimate arbiters of good and evil — nobody living my very comfortable lifestyle while people around the world starve could possibly claim to have fully internalized Jesus’s message.
Rather, the point is to understand how God works in history, and therefore how we should seek his will. He works through very imperfect people, nudging us towards justice. The gospel Paul preached is holy and terrifying and beautiful, and he expressed some views that were not. Paul let Christ transform the way he saw and interacted with Gentiles, and he failed to articulate the fullness of the gospel’s meaning for slavery and gender relations. Much like the rest of us, there were parts of God’s overwhelming and liberating love that he never fully internalized, and we lose something when ignore God’s work in the world because a particular first-century man didn’t predict it. This has several practical takeaways:
We really, really need to retire the argument that “I can see how my position is harmful to people, but there are a couple of verses in Paul’s letters that insist this is the case, so we have no choice but to follow them.” It’s an argument that was invented to defend slavery, and I can’t think of a historical case where it’s ever been right. Yes, this is about LGBT people and women in leadership roles.
Just like we idolize Paul and his offhand comments, I find it’s really easy to idolize people who are really godly in a particular way, and then either try to cover up their flaws or feel wildly betrayed by them. We need to hold space for people to be imperfect (and consequentially we need systems that don’t depend on the people at the top always, or even usually, doing the right thing.)
If Paul got things wrong, so will we. We need to be open to correction and willing to repent, especially when the consequences of our actions land on the most vulnerable members of society.
Except “at long intervals” 1 Corinthians 13.
The quote is from Jesus and the Disinherited. I became aware of it through Lisa Bowens’ African American Readings of Paul.
From Walker’s Appeal, In Four Articles; Together with A Preamble, To The Coloured Citizens of the World, But in Particular, and Very Expressly, To Those of The United States of America, Written in Boston, State of Massachusetts, September 28, 1829, as quoted in Bowens’ African American Readings of Paul.