Quotes About Paul

But Paul's vision of God's love, rising here like the sun on a clear summer's morning, shines through all the detail that has gone before. You need to wake up early, to get out of bed, and to throw back the curtains, to see it; that's what the previous four chapters are about. But now that we have done all that, the view is here for us to enjoy. And to be dazzled by. God's love has done everything we could need, everything we shall need.

Learning how to think as the Messiah had thought, Paul insisted, was the only way to radical unity in the church, and it was also the secret of how to live as "pure and spotless children of God in the middle of a twisted and depraved generation

In fact, the resistance to such claims may well come from the constant impulse to resist the Lordship of Jesus, the one through whom it is accomplished. Paul lived in a world where other 'lords' reigned supreme, and resented alternative candidates for their position. So do we. ROMANS

obvious Greek term for "loyalty" is one of Paul's favorite words, pistis, regularly translated "faith," but often carrying the overtones of "faithfulness," "reliability," and, yes, "loyalty.

He was a Jew who believed in the goodness of the original creation and the intention of the Creator to renew his world. His gospel of "salvation" was about Israel's Messiah "inheriting the world," as had been promised in the Psalms. What God had done in and through Jesus was, from Paul's perspective, the launching of a heaven-and-earth movement, not the offer of a new "otherworldly" hope.

For John, the cross reveals God's glory; for Paul, God's "righteousness"; for both, God's love.

An altogether more complicated issue concerns the parousia, or "royal presence" or "manifestation," of Jesus. Clearly it was always part of Paul's message that the kingdom, on earth as in heaven, had already been launched through the events of Jesus's death and resurrection, but it needed to be completed, and that would happen at Jesus's return.

This might be, after all, a way of smuggling in 'works' by the back door, into Paul's soteriology (something we Paulinists are trained to watch out for, like sniffer dogs at an airport ready to detect the slightest whiff of hard drugs).

Did Paul think that Jesus was the Messiah? Of course. Did recognizing someone as Messiah imply that God's people were regrouped around him? Naturally. Was that a non-Jewish or even anti-Jewish thing to suggest? Of course not. The point, anyway, is that for Paul the Messiah's people are both a 'new creation' and the fulfilment of the divine intention for Israel.

The main thing Paul wants to say in this paragraph is that God has done, in and through Jesus, what he promised and purposed all along.

What God had done in and through Jesus was, from Paul's perspective, the launching of a heaven-and-earth movement, not the offer of a new "otherworldly" hope.

Like so many other early Christians and in line with Jesus himself, Paul interprets the cross in relation to Passover: a new Passover, a new Exodus.

We may only be reading from the New Testament one paragraph of Paul, but as we get close to that reading and look not only at it but through it we can see the entire sweep of Paul's vision, of the biblical narrative focused now on Jesus and his messianic death and resurrection.

What Paul is saying is that the gospel, through which people receive the divine gift, reconstitutes them as genuine humans, as those who share the "reign" of the Messiah.

No, insists Paul, once you learn the meaning of the gospel, you have to see everything inside out.

By the time Jesus's body was taken down from the cross, Paul believed, these "rulers and authorities" had been stripped, shamed, and defeated.

Who is the "me" here? The "I" and "me" of Romans 7 is a literary device through which Paul is telling the life story of Israel under the Torah.

When Paul talks in his letters about 'the gospel', he doesn't primarily mean 'the way you too can get saved'. He means 'the message that says that Jesus, the crucified and risen one, is the Lord of the whole world'.

Paul, like most Jews of his day and many subsequently, believed that in God's good purposes world history was divided into the "present age" (the time when the powers were still ruling) and the "age to come," when God would assume his rightful power at last. The dark powers invoked in paganism had held the world captive in the "present evil age," but now something new had happened:

The victory achieved by Jesus didn't stop Paul from being shipwrecked, but it did mean that when he got to Rome to announce God as king and Jesus as Lord, he would know that he came with the scent of victory already in his nostrils. The God who defeated death through Jesus and rescued Paul from the depths of the sea would enable him to look worldly emperors in the face without flinching.

But from the start the early Christians believed that the resurrection body, though it would certainly be a body in the sense of a physical object, would be a transformed body, a body whose material, created from the old material, would have new properties. That is what Paul means by the "spiritual body": not a body made out of nonphysical spirit, but a physical body animated by the Spirit, a Spirit-driven body if you like: still what we would call physical but differently animated.

One Corinthians 15, one of Paul's longest sustained discussions and the climax of the whole letter, is about the creator God remaking the creation—not abandoning it, as Platonists of all sorts, including the gnostics, would have wanted.

Since Paul knew that his own hard and bitter heart had been changed by God's grace, he also knew that there was nobody this side of the grave who could not in principle be similarly reached and changed.

Paul saw himself living at the ultimate turning point of history. His announcement of Jesus in that culture at that moment was itself, he would have claimed, part of the long-term divine plan.