Paul Against Paul

Paul Against Paul

Now, up to this point I have been more or less even handed in my condemnation of both the Protestant and the Catholic Churches, as the largest part of the Doctrines of both Churches are Paulist; however, when one decides to examine for increments and degrees of fault, then the prize of the devil surely should go to the Protestants. For, after all, at one time the Catholics did have a Civilization to look after, something the Protestants never had to concern themselves over, and so the Catholics found it necessary to qualify and improve their Doctrines in order to promote the various Virtues and genres of Righteousness necessary to a Civilization.

The Protestants, who never concerned themselves with anything beyond Membership Appeals, took one of two other roads, that is, they made a choice between the two alternative Doctrines that Paul offered, obviously to two far different levels of Clientele, for either Salvation and Forgiveness on the one hand, or for the Idea of Predestination and Election – that nothing anybody does matters anyway and that one is either damned or he isn’t. Most Protestants, being of lower socio-economic standing, fall into the first Group, picking Salvation, because it is difficult to imagine how very many of these people would prefer the cold hearted bastard approach chosen by the more Well-to-Do Protestants – the Presbyterians, Slave-traders, Titans of Business, and Republicans, who interpret the Doctrine of Election in their own favor, seeing their Wealth as the first of many Rewards from God, and the Poverty of the rest of the World as proof of their inevitable damnation and sign that no care or concern need be wasted upon them.

Anyway, the Catholics have always found it shocking that the Protestants of one small faction or another would so narrowly focus on such narrow selections of Paulist Verses for what would amount to their Complete and Absolute take on ‘Christian’ Doctrine. And every Protestant Faction acted about the same way in this, indeed, it was the only thing they could all agree upon, that every single isolatable word in the Bible was tantamount to being the exact and absolute Word of God. Whatever they picked and choosed and separated out from the rest could be taken as a Whole and Entire Absolute Truth of God.

Yes, I have mentioned this before, that the Protestants created and elaborated this Doctrine of Word of God as a means of making the Words of Paul equal with those of Jesus. If every Word is equally True, it eliminates the distinction between Jesus and Paul, which is exactly what they sought to do. Anyway, various Protestant innovators would pick through Paulist Scripture and find a nuance here or there with which to build a separate Church all his own, where he could be his own Pope and not have to share any of the proceeds with any of those annoying Councils of Elders or any other Self Appointed Popes. In this sense, much of Protestant Doctrine serves only for Power Grabbing.

The Catholics deserve a bit more credit. Though they published the Bible and insist that it is entirely the Revelation from God, they were more careful than the Protestants in that they maintained that the Bible needs to be considered within its entire context, and if any passage deserves more weight than any other passage, than the preference should be towards citations from Christ and sections of the Bible where the intent had often been repeated and made clear by multiple examples and numerous elucidations. Also, the Catholics never conceded the point that the Bible was Complete, in and of itself, but allowed that parallel Oral Traditions (such as the Story of the Fallen Angels which is held as true but is not told in any detail in the Bible because everybody knew it already ‘orally’… it was learned back then on every mother’s lap) and the Traditions of Church Teachings could be valid apart from Scriptural Reference. After all, the Catholics maintained, it was they who published the Bible. To them the Bible was not so much the Word of God as the Word of the Church – at best a collection of primary reference materials, and the Church reserved the right to add to the pile if ever it so chose to do so. If one Church Council can decide One Thing, the next Church Council can decide another. The Illusion of a continuous Church Tradition is belied by the radical changes implemented by some several revolutionary Church Councils in its History, Vatican II being the most recent Revolution. The message for us all is that the Church is free to do whatever it likes… which is not necessary a bad thing.

But this Freedom that the Catholics allowed themselves would become an irksome point for the Protestants, that the Catholics could take the license to Dogmatize outside of Scripture when they themselves were tied down to having to find at least one loose verse somewhere upon which to pin all of their Hopes and Dreams, their Faith and Doctrines.

Really, the Protestant viewpoint, that the Bible is necessary Complete is a bit of a violation of the underlying Greek Theological Metaphysics of it all, that God must necessarily be Absolutely Infinite. The finite nature of the Bible would necessarily exclude it from being ‘complete’. Some novels are fatter than the Bible! But I have a feeling that the Protestant insistence that the Bible should be considered complete was hewn and wielded only out of mean spiritedness, seeing no further intent behind it all than that they could use it to condemn the Catholic Church. For instance, the Extra-Biblical Argument would be used repeatedly to attack Mary the Blessed Virgin, as the honor showed to her by Luke never seemed quite enough to the Protestants to warrant all the Praise that the Catholics heaped at Her Feet. And since Paul never mentioned Her, they assumed she was not worth the mention. Yes, that is not exactly logical, as an omitted argument is really not an argument at all, but, again, the Protestants may have only been looking for vulnerability and opportunities for attacking the Catholic Church. Even Martin Luther, Father of the Protestant Rebellion, never could quite fathom the hostility that soon arose up against Mary. It was his first understanding that what he had started had entirely escaped his control. What Man lets slip the Devil takes charge.

Anyway, soon enough the Catholics took on a tradition of answering the selective and too narrowly focused Paulist Doctrines of the Protestants, by quoting passages out of Paul that qualified or even opposed their particular intent. It was using Paul to fight Paul. The Catholics thought that they were being exceedingly clever. But was this really so wise considering, at the end of the day, that most Catholic Doctrine likewise rested upon Paulist premises. Did it really serve their purposes to show that Paul was inconsistent and self-contradictory? They were too clever by half.

But the Catholics started small and did not imagine how far it could go. Indeed, my thoughts on Paul started the same way… as a new Catholic I went over the Paulist Letters simply to find where the Protestants had got them wrong. I found it was not just the Protestants…

But let’s move on to details. If we call to mind some of the most antagonistic points of the Protestant Rebellion we will remember the controversy between Faith and Works. The Protestants blamed the Catholics for trying to ‘earn’ their Salvation via ‘works’. The Protestants insisted that Salvation was guaranteed by Grace invoked by faith alone. There was no need to even lift a finger. The Protestants point this out in Romans 3:28 “For we hold that a man is justified by faith apart from works”. And then there is Romans 4:5 “one who does not work, his faith is reckoned as righteousness”. We have Ephesians 2:8 and 9, “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God -- not because of works, lest any man should boast.” Then, there is the broader assertion for Faith Alone in Romans 14:23, “for whatever does not proceed from faith is sin”. Finally we have what might be considered an actual prohibition against Works, from Galatians Chapter 5, as Works were so often equated with behavior according to the Law, “You are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law; you have fallen away from grace.” It was Salvation by Faith or nothing at all. And if one were to simply read the verses they supplied, then it would seem that they had made a tidy case of it.

But the Catholics found a defense for their Good Works. See Romans 2: 6 and 7, “For he will render to every man according to his works: to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life”. This hardly admits to any Faith at all! Grace goes to he whoever marches sternly and steadily forward and takes it firmly in hand. Then we have Hebrews 6:10, “For God is not so unjust as to overlook your work”. Then we have the whole tenure of Galatians Chapter six which is toward Good Works, “whatever a man sows, that he will also reap…And let us not grow weary in well-doing, for in due season we shall reap…let us do good to all men”. Yes, while there is no absolute predication here of our Salvation upon Works, there is obviously the removal of any Curse upon Works, that to do good works would somehow be tantamount to ‘Boasting’ before God, a veritable rejection of Grace.

Oh, there is Paul’s puzzling dissociation from Good Works. For instance in 1st Corinthians 15, “I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God which is with me”. Paul starts out by bragging about his Works, but then has to quickly apologize, claiming to be passive in Grace, dodging to stay within the bounds of his own Doctrines. But we are left with the impression that Good Works are Good.

But criticism and argument can go far deeper, even deep enough to erode the pillars of Salvation itself. Go back again to Galatians chapter 6 and read further down – “fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God”. Here, quite clearly we find Paul making a direct connection between behavior and Salvation. We are given a complete list of sins that Jesus will simply not tolerate. We can detect the same reasoning earlier in Romans Chapter 3, that while “All fall short of the Glory of God”, we have the assurance several verses further on that “God passes over former Sins”. But what is implied is that only Sins in the Past Tense are forgiven, and that Salvation is not meant to cover any chronic character flaws or personality disorders resulting in a continuing pattern of imperfect behaviors. It brings us to the startling conclusion that one is only Saved if one has obviously and manifestly been made Perfect by Grace. Apparently we are all to be judged upon the Character and Behavior Profile we present at the time of our Demise, and if on the day before we die we are not entirely Christ-like then we are in fact screwed.

Now, let us not be too pessimistic. Go over that list again – “fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing”. This is not an impossible standard, especially for an old man or old woman who is dying in the midst of a loving and supportive family. Over the last several thousand years I can imagine that hundreds of thousands of Souls have died in the requisite Purity, not touching the terrible Sins that Paul describes, so much so that Salvation would be theirs, Grace or no. Being Good and refraining from Evil may be all the Salvation anybody needs.

But my ideas here are hardly entirely original. It is an idea that has occurred to many ‘heretical’ sects throughout History, that Religious people should be Good, and that continued Sinning is counter-indicative of Salvation. Indeed, such proclamations have been repeatedly tossed up as indictments against the profoundly corrupt College of Catholic Bishops, Paul’s biggest Partisans within the Church. But the Bishops have always rejected these ‘heresies’, on the Argument that Humanity’s Original Sin allows for continued sinfulness even while within the State of Grace. I think we have Saint Augustine to thank for this augmentation and exception to Scripture. It is one case where the Protestants stand shoulder to shoulder with the Catholics, and John Calvin hardly uses a phrase that Augustine hadn’t used before him.

Anyway, back to the eroding supports of our Immortal Salvation… we hear so much of the importance of Faith, and so any Doubt would be a huge problem for us. The Protestants have tried to guard against this kind of doubt, by proposing a rather historically recent doctrine of “Once Saved Always Saved”… which makes a great bumper sticker, but has only shaky scriptural references for its support. There is the ‘Magic Word’ passage in Romans Chapter 10 – “if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved”. That’s it! Final. Saved is saved is saved is saved. It is a fine doctrine as long as one looks no further. But Paul goes on to list further areas where Salvation can be revoked. In Romans Chapter 11, which emphasizes God’s prerogative to do whatever He likes, Paul declares that God’s kindness toward the Saved can quite turn on a dime, even without provocation or cause. In Colossians chapter 1 we find that Faith must not waver, but also that the Faith needs to be entirely factual – all the little details have to be just right. With so many ‘Christian’ Doctrines currently circulating, and with the combined logical contradictions telling us that it would be nearly impossible for any Doctrine today to be ‘exactly’ true and pure, well, how certain can anybody’s Faith be when opposed by such odds? One might suppose it easier to replace the Struggle for Faith with the Struggle to simply behave one’s self.

Oh, in reading this essay, for anybody who may have noticed, this strategy of using Paul to counter Paul at least vindicates Paul from being considered a total Antichrist. Really, here I must admit that to call Paul ‘the’ Antichrist probably makes more out of him than he would ever deserve to be. The truth is that Paul was neither as good nor as bad as people made him out to be. We can allow that he probably never fully intended the corruption and fall of a Civilization. But, still, he is not blameless either. If one reads the Letters of Paul carefully and honestly, then, although he did qualify and condition his Teachings, he nonetheless argued for an overall System or Doctrine of Amoral Salvation. We can see this mostly in Paul’s letter to the Romans – not the first Letter Paul wrote, but placed first in the Bible, indicative of its Systematic Importance. What I suppose happened was that Paul was drawn in by the tendency of his Time to Vastly Oversimplify Everything, that is, to draw up Large All-Embracing Answers to Things, to create a Unified Philosophy, a Grand System… an Easy Answer. So in a fit of Megalomania, he dashed off the Letter to the Romans. His primary intent was to demonstrate that God could recognize the existence of Gentiles, a People of Faith, and not just the favored Jews, a People of the Law. But obviously Paul got carried away with himself, by the power of his own verbosity and arrived at a construct for a Salvation independent of consideration for Individual Moral Responsibility – a mechanism for the Forgiveness of Sins which would be interpreted by subsequent Generations as a License to Sin. Yes, the little details would argue against it, but that was all just the ‘fine print’. Nobody ever reads the fine print, and that is what the crooks all count on, isn’t it?

So we cannot forgive Paul entirely on the grounds that he has been woefully misunderstood. In both First Corinthians chapter 15 and in the second Chapter of Galatians Paul repeats the notion that unless the Salvation Doctrine is True, then Christ died for nothing. It is not really a logical argument, is it? But, really, we are supposed to believe that the entire fabric of Christian Salvation rests upon the assumption that a bunch of Jewish and Roman Special Interest Groups couldn’t have simply decided to just have Jesus murdered for the sake of their political convenience. Oh, and we need to remember that Paul belonged to one of these Special Interest Groups, the Pharisees – sworn enemies of Jesus, and Paul was probably extremely active in lobbying to have Jesus murdered (for was he not later the highest ranking Persecutor of the Christians? Paul did not become the Great Persecutor in a single day. It was likely his Life Work up to then). Considering how much effort Paul and his fellows put into murdering Christ, it is really a most disingenuous argument he puts forward, that Jesus died because of the metaphysical requirements of Salvation. Paul was there, he knew the Truth. He knew why it was imperative that Jesus should be killed, and it wasn’t so God could implement a Salvation that would serve only to Forgive the Murderers of His Only Beloved. Jesus was cut down so the rise of a a Messiah would not upset the Status Quo. Too many people were making good money for them to wish to upset the apple cart or rock the boat. Paul, at the time, liked things just the way they were and voted with all of the other Pharisees to have Jesus put down. Indeed, Paul probably put forward the Motion himself to murder Christ or he gave it a quick Second.

But Paul did not let it end there. Having killed the Messiah, it played on his mind until he decided to be a Messiah himself. Somehow he justified it in his own mind that it would be okay for himself to upset the Status Quo. What was forbidden to Christ Himself would be okay for Paul. Yes, people argue that Paul carried on the Name and Fame of Jesus. But we should consider how much better it might have been had Paul and his fellows let Jesus live. We might assume that Jesus would have accumulated more fame for Himself than Paul’s stunted little imitation, unless an excess of Fame is something we can more expect from the Devil. After all, how much Popularity can we expect for things like Moral Responsibility and Righteousness. Paul probably allowed himself advantages Jesus would never have taken, such as selling Free Sin in the slummy City Centers of Athens and Carthage. But Jesus may have well evened things up with his Miracles and genuine Saintliness. In any case, we can be fairly sure we’d have a better body of Teaching and Doctrine from a Jesus Christ who had been allowed to live to ninety years than from One who had been snuffed out at 33.

Yes, Paul invoked the name of Jesus Christ over and over again. But that never made Him Jesus Christ, despite his claims. How many crazy people today claim to speak with the Voice of Jesus Christ, and nobody thinks twice of believing them. In charity such people are given anti-psychotic drugs. But when Paul makes the same crazy claims, it is treated like The Word of God. That makes us crazy, doesn’t it?

It is perhaps History’s greatest tragedy that not only was Jesus murdered, but that one of his Murderers was able to rise up to usurp His place, co-opt His Name, and distort his Teachings and pervert His Doctrines.