Follow Jesus Christ

Jesus and Paul disclose reality in different ways. Jesus reveals reality orally and directly. He shows it through a person’s encounter with God, through an action, a parable, a paradox. After talking with Jesus a person did not necessarily receive a new theory, but often began to see himself and God differently. Paul, in his letters, reveals the same reality primarily through conceptualization. He tries to explain how discrete events — Adam, the Law, the cross, the resurrection, justification — all fit together into a single picture. In other words, it’s the difference between “showing” and “explaining.” Jesus reveals truth mainly through the experience of encountering it, personally and orally; Paul does so by constructing a theological interpretation in writing.

If all of Paul’s letters had vanished and only the Gospels remained, a person could still become a disciple of Jesus. But imagine the reverse — only Paul’s letters survived and the Gospels did not — reconstructing the person of Jesus and his way of thinking would be almost impossible. Paul himself acknowledged that the person of Jesus was not the explicit aim of his teaching. We would have a powerful theological system, but we would not, to the same extent, see Jesus’ living method of communication: his parables, his questions, his meetings with people. That does not prove Paul wrong, but it shows that their centers of gravity differ. For Jesus the center is the person himself and the Kingdom of God as experienced by the person; for Paul it is the interpretation of the meaning of Jesus’ person and work for the history of humanity.

Jesus has almost no explanatory theology. He almost never answers questions like “Why does evil exist at all?”, “How exactly is sin transmitted?”, “By what mechanism does redemption operate?”, “What happened in the cosmos after the Fall?”, “How do grace and human will interact?”, “What is the metaphysical structure of salvation?” When he was asked such things, he almost always turned the conversation back to the person. For example, people wanted a theory: “Why did the tower in Siloam fall?” Jesus answered, “If you do not repent, you will likewise perish.” “Who sinned — this man or his parents?” Jesus does not begin to construct a theory of the origin of suffering. He says, “That the works of God might be displayed in him.” “Where does evil come from?” He answers, “From the heart of man come evil thoughts…” In other words, not cosmology but a diagnosis, a real way forward. That is why Jesus’ style is very hard, almost impossible, to imitate.

Jesus’ teaching feels fresh even after two thousand years. It hardly resembles theological treatises. It is always aimed at changing the person rather than satisfying an intellectual query. Jesus did not want to satisfy curiosity. He constantly made unexpected turns. A person would ask, “Why?” and Jesus would answer, “What are you going to do?” Someone asked, “Who is to blame?” and Jesus answered, “Follow me.” Someone asked, “When will the Kingdom come?” and Jesus answered, “It is already among you.” In other words, he practically refused to engage in constructing mass worldview systems. Perhaps he tried to give more systematic instruction only to his closest disciples, among whom Paul was not numbered.

Jesus speaks predominantly in an existential register: what is happening between God and a particular person here and now. Paul speaks predominantly in an interpretive register: how to explain the universal significance of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection for all humanity. Again, this does not mean Paul was wrong. It means his mode of thought is a different genre. In theory one can create many theological systems similar to Paul’s, but it is impossible to create another Jesus or his teaching. Not because it is impossible to speak about God, but because it is extraordinarily difficult to reproduce his transcendent capacities and his distinctive way of shifting attention from explaining the world to transforming the person. Let us ourselves try to construct in this article a theory analogous to Paul’s. For clarity, let us use expressions characteristic of Paul, but with a different, defensible understanding of history. This is how it might look in some letter.

“Through the first man a false image of God entered the world. While people beheld God as he is, love arose naturally. But when the image of God was distorted, fear appeared. Fear produced the desire to protect oneself. Self-protection produced selfishness. Selfishness produced sin. Thus sin spreads to everyone alive through culture, upbringing, language, religion, family and society. Every child comes into the world without a ready-made picture of God. He receives it from those around him. If those around him know God poorly, they pass on a damaged image. Each generation inherits a distorted worldview that almost inevitably produces sin. Just as a photograph copied thousands of times gradually loses sharpness, humanity drifts farther away from the original knowledge of God. Therefore sin becomes universal. Adam sinned first and that sin was transmitted to all who live. Everyone is born into a world where the truth about God is already seriously damaged. The Law of Moses could not fix the situation. It merely showed people how far their ideas had departed from the truth. The Law exposed the sickness but did not cure it. Therefore Christ comes as the perfect revelation of the Father. ‘He who has seen me has seen the Father.’ He does not merely bring new commandments. He restores the original image of God. A person begins to trust God. Trust destroys fear. The need to live solely for one’s own salvation disappears. Love becomes natural again. Thus salvation is primarily the healing of consciousness: the restoration of true knowledge of God and, as a consequence, the transformation of the person.”

On what grounds today do people argue that Paul’s theological interpretation is the only correct and absolutely necessary one? Several arguments are used.

First, it is pointed out in Paul’s favor that Jesus himself did not leave a systematic theology for the broad masses, and this is indeed a historical fact. He spoke in parables, aphorisms, images. He hid his teaching from the uninitiated. Therefore, if he wanted the Church to continue, someone had to reflect on the meaning of his life and death. The very need for theological reflection thus arises naturally. But even if theological reflection is necessary, why this particular reflection? Why not another? Why not several canonical reflections?

Second, defenders of Paul note that he was not alone. In his letters he repeatedly emphasizes that he compared his gospel with the leaders of the Jerusalem church; he says he met with Peter, James and John, and they extended the right hand of fellowship. If one trusts this, it appears that the principal apostles did not see a fundamental distortion in his gospel. However, Peter and James’s agreement might have meant only agreement regarding the mission to the Gentiles and the basic gospel. That does not logically imply they approved every conceptual scheme of Paul’s — for example, his discussions about Adam or about women’s veils.

Third, the New Testament does not correct Paul. That counts for him. If Paul had truly created his own religion, one would expect later New Testament authors to try to correct him. But that is scarcely visible. On the contrary, even the author of Second Peter says that Paul writes wisely, although it is hard to understand him. Thus the early church tended to integrate Paul more than to polemicize with him. However, the absence of criticism is not proof of absolute truth. It only shows that the Pauline tradition became dominant and popular. Indeed, over two thousand years Paul’s interpretation became the basis of almost all global Christianity: Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and most Protestant traditions. One could argue that if God guides the Church, such prolonged and near-universal acceptance of Paul is indirect evidence of the truth of his theology. Yet this argument works only within the presupposition of the infallibility or special guidance of ecclesial tradition. Historically, wide circulation of a particular interpretation by itself does not prove its exclusive truth.

Yes, there are good reasons to consider Paul’s theology deeply rooted in early Christian tradition and compatible with Jesus’ preaching. But to build a strict proof that it is the only possible and only true interpretation of Jesus’ words is much harder. That would require adding extra premises — for example, that Christ in some special way guaranteed the infallibility of apostolic theological development, or that the New Testament canon as a whole possesses divinely inspired unity. If one does not accept those premises, the question remains open for historical and theological debate. It is worth noting that Jesus himself in no way guaranteed the infallibility of all his disciples’ statements, and he did not affirm a New Testament canon that did not yet exist in his time. The theory of biblical inerrancy is the sole basis for why Paul’s interpretation is treated as sacred and set on a par with Jesus’ own teaching. Paradoxically, the idea of biblical inerrancy both preserves Jesus’ teaching and endows other biblical teachings with the same authority as the Gospels.

Paul’s theological interpretation and systematization are only one possible reading of Jesus’ revelation. It worked for his generation. But the source is still the authentic teaching of Jesus. Nowhere in the New Testament is there a direct statement that Jesus explicitly commissioned Paul to systematize doctrine. That term describes what Paul in fact did, but not necessarily what he was explicitly instructed to do. An analogy may help. Suppose a Teacher tells a pupil, “Go and teach mathematics.” The pupil writes a textbook. A very good one — perhaps the best in history. But that does not automatically mean that every chapter of that textbook was pre-dictated by the Teacher. Over time an even better textbook will doubtless appear. Paul acted as he sincerely believed he should.

The New Testament texts allow us to say that Christ called Paul to missionary service and that Paul considered his gospel received through a revelation of Christ. But the claim that Christ specifically commissioned Paul to create a normative theological system is a theological inference, not a direct quotation or explicit content of those texts. Why did Paul take upon himself the boldness to create his system? Probably because he, as a theologian and scholar, honestly did not see how to preach without such a system. After becoming acquainted with Paul’s personal conception, each believer is still compelled to go to Jesus and work on personal fellowship with the Heavenly Father according to Jesus’ authentic teaching. Paul helped ancient society understand the Gospel; but to experience an encounter with Jesus is something entirely different and, without doubt, the most important thing.