Answering the Call: What Saint Paul Really Said

(My last two posts in this series, here and here, picked up on the story I started in my introductory post, and therefore didn't have as much story themselves. This book requires quite a bit more of an introduction. You've been warned!)

During my high school years God called me into ministry. I balked. I could wax philosophical about how a calling to ministry is so much more involved in terms of what it requires of the whole person. I could point out that Forbes article that lists being a pastor as the 5th toughest leadership position available. But the truth was two-fold: The call scared me and to obey would cost me the things I really wanted - money and security. 

What teenager looks at a potential career path and says, 'You know, that sounds utterly terrifying. I'm in!' For that matter, what adult does this? In hindsight, if what you think of as your calling doesn't scare you in some way then you probably haven't identified your calling, but I didn't know that then and I don't like to think about it too much now.  

So, I told God to take a hike - "I'm going to be an engineer, thank you very much." 

I know, I was quite the rebel. Running away from my heavenly father to do something so risky and edgy and unconventional. It has often amused me that God is regularly stranger than anything I would come up with. This is the way of sin. Despite the ways we deceive ourselves into believing otherwise our rebellions are mundane compared to the adventurous ways of God. 

Anyway, I went to the University of Alberta and studied engineering. For one semester. 

By the time I finished my first semester I had been running from God for a year and a half. That was as far as I got. Life without God was worse, even if I thought I was doing what I wanted. 

I wanted to reconcile with God. I wanted to start obeying him again. What I didn't know was how to do that. Sure, He had clearly called me back in high school. But then I had run and ignored him and told him to get lost. Whatever reconciliation looked like, it couldn't still be that. Surely I had disqualified myself from that! I didn't have the language for it, but I must have felt, in some small and lesser way, the same as Peter did after he had denied Jesus. He went back to fishing. What else was left? Surely he had disqualified himself from the position of apostle. Surely, that is, until Jesus met him on the shore and told him to feed the sheep. 

There were a lot of important moments in my journey of returning to God. One of them was getting a ride back home to Calgary for the Christmas holidays with 3 people I hardly knew: Steve, Tom, and Carey. 

During a conversation with Steve, the only other person awake, he asked me why I wasn't going into ministry. He didn't know I had felt called or run away; in fact, he hardly knew me at all. 

Steve's question was one moment in my journey of Jesus doing the same thing with me. Letting me know that my mistakes and failures had not disqualified me but, instead, His grace covered me and I was still loved and called. 

When I came back to the university in January Steve sought me out. I had stuck in his mind and he had books he wanted to lend me. Two, to start: The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer and What Saint Paul Really Said by N.T. Wright. 

Some of you may be surprised that I am writing about the latter and not the former. The Cost of Discipleship was, and is, a great book. If you had asked me as an undergraduate student which of these two books was more formative, I would have named Bonhoeffer's book. Here was a man who taught that the call to discipleship was the call to come and die, and then he had lived out his words. Bonhoeffer was a pastor and theologian who was executed for his part in an assassination plot against Hitler. I was an undergraduate student who hadn't wanted to give up my dream of a 2-car garage and a white picket fence. Reading his book was like hitting the nitrous. 

However, with 20 years of hindsight, it is not Bonhoeffer who stands out in this exchange, but Wright. I remember reading Wright's book, and then reading it again, and then, with the arrogance of youth, concluding that he had some amazing things to say but the book was poorly written. This explained why I needed to read it twice... 

Regardless of my poor judgement, What Saint Paul Really Said was a landscape photo next to The Cost of Discipleship's nitrous. As such, long after the nitrous had burned out, and the car was abandoned on the side of the road, I've kept that landscape photo in my pack while I trudge through the wilderness of the mountains of faith. 

In this book N.T. Wright walks through the high points of Pauline theology in order to show that Paul did not found Christianity nor the church. It's a short book and so he touches on a lot of things he doesn't get to fully develop. In many ways, Wright lays out the agenda for what he has published since. 

That the biblical vision of the promised future is of resurrection and embodied existence rather than an immortal soul floating in heaven? Check. 

That the resurrection of Jesus is just as central to the story of salvation as His crucifixion? Check. 

That the center of the gospel is the kingship of Jesus? Check. 

That we have subtly misunderstood the Pauline language of Justification? Check. 

I could go on. What Saint Paul Really Said is a good book. I find myself in the strange position, though, of saying that you will do better to read Wright's other work, not because this one isn't worth the time, but because his writing since then fleshes out what he only begins in this book. On the other hand, if you want a brief introduction to Wright, I'm not sure you can do better than this book. 

This book formed me in several ways.  

First of all, there is a lot of heterodoxy that sneaks into popular evangelical Christianity. The whole bit about a disembodied heaven, for example. Or that the central point in the gospel is how I can get to heaven. This book takes an ax to the root of a lot of those ideas. It forced me to begin grappling with the full text of scripture, rather than simply cherry-picking my favorite verses that supported what I already thought. It introduced me to a much more historically grounded set of theological ideas and biblical interpretations. 

Second, it introduced me to the world of academic biblical literature. From here I went on to read other books by N.T. Wright, David Wenham, F.F. Bruce, Albert Schweitzer, and more.

Third, and finally, Wright gave me a strong dose of theological humility. This came through the whole book but it stuck, primarily, through two lines: "One is not justified by faith by believing in justification by faith. One is justified by faith by believing in Jesus." 

This might take a minute to unpack. 

We all believe we are right. That's the way beliefs work. Some beliefs are thin and easily changed. Others are thick and hang on. Yet, one of the dangers of evangelical Christianity is believing not only that I am right but that my being right is what matters. Or, to put it in more Christian language, that my salvation depends on my having gotten it right. But I am not saved by my own correct understanding; I am saved by Jesus. To think that what matters is that I get it right is to create a system which rests on me. 

Wright cuts through the whole mess. I'm not justified because of my appropriate grasp of theology. I am not saved because my knowledge of God is good enough. I am justified through faith in the living person of Jesus. My confidence is not in my own knowing but in the faithfulness of the one I know. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, and I do not possess him, or any of these things, in their fullness. I am, when I am at my best, on the way. Therefore, being fully committed to Jesus means, quintessentially, that I am able to meet reality, in all of its unpredictable glory, with open hands, an open heart, and hope. It also means my very commitment to Jesus gets my self out of the way. I can seek to share Jesus with people and not my certainty. 

I can't pretend I worked that all out immediately. Nor can I pretend that the above paragraph explains very well, or very fully, what I am trying to say. I think it makes enough sense to leave it here for now though. 

That quote about justification has sat with me for years and popped up as a I read other books, some of which will appear later in this series. It has been like a seed that has taken a long time to sprout and start growing. Or, like a landscape photo that I knew would be important, but didn't understand how until I got to that particular portion of the mountain journey. 

What I did work out, immediately, was that I needed to refocus. The question was not how right I could get everything, but did I know and walk with and trust Jesus. 

For a guy who has always liked to get it all right and win everything that kind of shift is a big deal. 

Note: This post is part of a series which I began here. To see all the posts in the series click the label at the bottom of this post "20yrs40bks".