The Apostle Paul and Authority: Should We Hear More?

Fellow Anglo-Catholic blogger, Fr. Giles Pinnock, rightly asks the question concerning "why" Anglo-Catholics have not done very much to focus on the Apostle Paul in the Year of S. Paul. I think that is a fair question. To my knowledge, one bishop in the Catholic integrity has focused his Ebbsfleet Extras on the Apostle Paul (I wrote for the March 2009 edition) and those can be found on his website under the See of Ebbsfleet. Bishop Andrew has done a good service in having different priests around the C of E write for his Extra and has asked the writers to focus on a certain theme of S. Paul He is much to be commended for this and I have followed suit by focusing my Agape Fellowships that meet in my home on the second and fourth Sunday of each month on the Apostle Paul's letters. We are looking closely at Paul's letter to the Colossians now. The Holy Father reminds us why this Apostle is so important in an address he gave on 4 February at a general audience. I leave a portion of it below.

It is obvious that the fathers of the Church and afterward all the theologian have drawn form the Letters of St. Paul and his spirituality. He has remained during the centuries, until today, as true teacher and apostle to the Gentiles. The first patristic commentary that has arrived to us regarding a writing of the New Testament is from the great Alexandrian theologian Origen, who comments on the Letter of St. Paul to the Romans.

This commentary is unfortunately conserved only in part. St. John Chrysostom, besides commenting his letters, has written of him his seven memorable panegyrics. St. Augustine owes him the decisive step of his own conversion and he will return to Paul during all of his life. From this permanent dialogue with the Apostle derives his great Catholic theology and also for Protestants of all times. St. Thomas Aquinas has left us a beautiful commentary on the Pauline letters, which represents the most mature fruit of medieval exegesis.

A true point of inflection was verified in the 16th century with the Protestant Reformation. The decisive moment in Luther's life was the so-called Turmerlebnis (1517) in which in one moment he encountered a new interpretation of the Pauline doctrine on justification. An interpretation that liberated him from the scruples and anxieties of his preceding life and that gave him a new, radical confidence in the goodness of God, who pardons everything without condition. From that moment, Luther identified the Judeo-Christian legalism condemned by the Apostle with the order of life of the Catholic Church. And the Church appeared to him as an expression of the slavery to the law to which he opposed the liberty of the Gospel. The Council of Trent, between 1545 and 1563, deeply interpreted the question of justification and encountered in the line of all Catholic tradition the synthesis between law and Gospel, conforming to the message of sacred Scripture read in its totality and unity.

The 19th century, gathering the best heritage of the Enlightenment, witnessed a new renovation of Paulinism, now above all in the plane of scientific work developed for the historical-critical interpretation of sacred Scripture. Let us set aside here the fact that also in that century, as in the 20th, there emerged a true and proper denigration of St. Paul. I think above all of Nietzsche, who poked fun at the theology of humility in St. Paul, opposing to it his theology of the strong and powerful man. But let us leave that aside and look at the essential current of the new scientific interpretation of sacred Scripture and the new Paulinism of that century.

Here is emphasized as central above all the Pauline thought of the concept of liberty: In this is seen the heart of the thought of Paul, as on the other hand, Luther had already intuited. Now, nevertheless, the concept of liberty was reinterpreted in the context of modern liberalism. And later, the differentiation between the proclamation of St. Paul and the proclamation of Jesus was strongly emphasized. And St. Paul appears almost as a new founder of Christianity. It is certain that in St. Paul, the centrality of the Kingdom of God, determinant for the proclamation of Jesus, is transformed in the centrality of Christology, whose determinant point is the Paschal mystery. And from the Paschal mystery, come the sacraments of baptism and Eucharist, as a permanent presence of this mystery, from which the Body of Christ grows, and the Church is built.

But I would say, without entering here into details, that precisely in the new centrality of Christology and the Paschal mystery, the Kingdom of God is fulfilled, the authentic proclamation of Jesus is made concrete, present, operative. We have seen in the preceding catechesis that precisely this Pauline novelty is the deepest fidelity to the proclamation of Jesus. In the progress of exegesis, above all in the last 200 years, the convergences between Catholic and Protestant exegesis also grow, thus bringing about a notable consensus precisely in the point that was at the origin of the greatest historical dissent. Therefore a great hope for the cause of ecumenism, so central for the Second Vatican Council.

Briefly, I would like at the end to still point out the various religious movements, arising in the modern age in the heart of the Catholic Church, that refer back to St. Paul. That's what came about in the 16th century with the Clerics Regular of St. Paul, called the Barnabites; in the 19th century with the Missionary Society of St. Paul the Apostle, better known as the Paulist Fathers; and in the 20th century with the multifaceted Pauline Family, founded by Blessed James Alberione; to not speak of the secular institute of the Company of St Paul.

Substantially, there remains luminous before us the figure of an extremely fruitful and deep apostle and Christian thinker, from whose closeness, every one of us can benefit. In one of his panegyrics, St. John Chrysostom made an original comparison between Paul and Noah, expressing it like this: Paul "did not place together the shafts to build an ark, instead, in place of uniting tablets of wood, he composed letters, and thus dug out of the waters not two or three or five members of his own family, but the entire inhabited world that was about to perish" (Paneg. 1,5).

Precisely still and always the Apostle Paul can do this. To tend toward him, as much to his apostolic example as to his doctrine, would be therefore a stimulus, if not a guarantee, to consolidate the Christian identity of each one of us and for the renewal of the whole Church.

I have to agree with Fr. Pinnock's concerns that there is a lot more that needs to be said in this year of S. Paul in regards to his teachings.