Paul the Man

Paul is the best-known man of his age and one of the most interesting men of all ages. He had the greatness of a man with a single purpose. His life was given to only one end—he was a missionary of the gospel of Christ. But to that one task he brought a marvelous diversity of gifts, and it is this many-sided character of the man that makes his personality so interesting. Preacher, teacher, theologian, missionary, church founder and organizer, poet, logician, mystic, moralist: he was all these and more.

I. We may study him first as man of mind, the great thinker and teacher of Christianity. He had the keenness and mental alertness which belonged to the Greek, joined to the spiritual vision of a Hebrew prophet. His first great deed was to interpret Christianity. It is one of the strange facts of history, that this man who never knew Jesus personally saw the meaning of Christianity as none of the twelve did. He awoke Christianity to self-consciousness. He gave her a message and a voice. He interpreted Christianity to the mind of the Roman world. He showed. them Jesus not simply as Jewish Messiah but as the Saviour of the world. Christianity was first of all a great experience to him, but he had also the power to interpret that experience.

But this man of mind was not a man of mere logic. With all his keen intellect, he was not concerned with theory or speculation. His concern is with truth as it bears upon life. His great conceptions of religion all root in his own experience. And Paul was a psychologist; he knew how to read the meaning of what his own soul had gone through and to draw its lesson for others. To this was joined his experience as missionary, preaching to others the truth that had made his own life. Sometimes, it is true, we hear the Jewish rabbi speaking in his arguments, but the great truths for which Paul stands had this vital source. It is this that has made Paul so great an influence in the Christian thinking of the centuries.

II. We may consider Paul, in the second place, as a man of will. It is his strength of will that first of all impresses us. We feel that the personality of Paul is one of the great forces of history. This man had a clear purpose and an indomitable spirit back of it. The will of the man is seen in the greatness of that purpose. It is no less than the establishment of the new faith throughout the empire, and that by his own effort. No hardship, no toil, no danger holds him back. Beaten by Jews and by Romans, stoned, shipwrecked, imprisoned, fighting against illness, against the doubt of fellow Christians and the relentless hostility of the Jews, he moves on unswerving and with undaunted will. He had no organization back of him. To disarm criticism he supported himself by labor. And for this great work he had but a few years at command. Yet he carried out his plan in the main. His great campaign might well be placed beside that of Alexander or Napoleon, while in the permanency of his work he surpassed them both.

The study of Paul's life shows his strength as a leader at every stage. He is everywhere the master of men and of circumstances. In rude Galatia or cultured Athens, before the Philippian prætors or the angry mob of his countrymen, facing royal judges or in the presence of imminent death, he is always the same, unmoved by danger, unawed by authority. His independence is the more remarkable when we think of his position. His only credentials as he began his mission were his story of a vision. That was enough, however, for him. That vision and call lie back of his independence and his courage. He was an apostle "not from men, neither through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father." For that reason there was a deep humility joined to his independence. It is not his own strength but God's grace. "When I am weak, then am I strong," he said. "I can do all things in him that strengtheneth me." "We have this treasure in earthen vessels," he declares, "that the exceeding greatness of the power may be of God."

On its moral side, then, this strength of will is simply an absolute devotion to high purpose. His life has but one meaning—the preaching of the gospel. "One thing I do," he says. He has no other interest in life. We hear nothing of his family, except a casual reference to his nephew. He seems to have cut the ties of home as of nation. He has no friends except his fellow workers. "I count all things to be loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord. I press on, if so be that I may lay hold on that for which also I was laid hold on by Christ Jesus. For me to live is Christ."

III. And yet this man of keen intellect and inflexible will was also a man of heart. Indeed, it is here that we find the real Paul. In depth of feeling and range of religious experience and emotion it would be hard to find another to place beside him. Not that Paul is a flawless saint. His passionate feeling seems sometimes to have led him to a severity of judgment and a denunciation of his opponents which do not accord with his own teachings; and he may have erred on the other side in indulgence toward those he loved. If there be such defects, they are only incident to his strength. And in this emotional side of his nature Paul's strength largely lay. He was no man of cold calculation and shrewd prudence. He loved with the tenderness of a woman and the devotion of a mother, and he could fight with all the passion of his nature. It made him the most loved and the most hated of men. He bound his friends to him for life, and he gained enemies who pursued him to his death.

Paul's religious experience is the first and deepest element in this side of his nature. Out of this experience came his message and his restless activity. Paul will never be understood so long as men think of him as primarily a great theologian or church organizer. He was first of all a Christian. Doctrine and institution are always simply forms in which life expresses itself. The life itself is greater than all its forms. Paul did an incalculable service to the church in expounding the meaning of the new faith, but we must always distinguish between these doctrines of Paul and the living faith which they seek to set forth. His letters show us again and again how all his thought and service flow out of this inner spring. "For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that one died for all, therefore all died; and he died for all, that they that live should no longer live unto themselves, but unto him who for their sakes died and rose again. Wherefore if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature: the old things are passed away; behold, they are become new. We are ambassadors therefore on behalf of Christ, as though God were entreating by us" (2 Cor 5:14, 15, 17, 20).

With this depth of Paul's religious life there went an equally wonderful range. What he preached to men he himself had passed through. His speech may have lacked polish, but we do not wonder that it was with power. He himself was the sinner, like those to whom he spoke. Out of his own heart he spoke of the burden of guilt and the bondage of evil: "The good which I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I practice. Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?" (Rom 7:19, 24). The deliverance which he proclaimed he himself rejoiced in: "I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. There is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus made me free from the law of sin and death" (Rom 7:25; 8:1, 2). When Paul speaks of the new life that is given to the believer, of the new spirit that lives in man's heart and makes a new creature, this too is out of his own experience: "It is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me: and that life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself up for me" (Gal 2:20).

Besides the religious life, Paul's emotional nature may be studied in his relations with men. Whichever way we turn, we note his depth and power of feeling. He loved his nation. This man who made Christianity universal, who made it his life task to carry the gospel to the Gentiles, who was held as a traitor to his race for so doing, was, in fact, the most ardent of patriots. He declares that devotion in the most solemn words: "I say the truth in Christ, I lie not, my conscience bearing witness with me in the Holy Spirit, that I have great sorrow and unceasing pain in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were anathema from Christ for my brethren's sake, my kinsmen according to the flesh." And with all his work for the Gentiles, Israel yet remained for him a nation by herself: "Whose is the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the services of God, and the promises, whose are the fathers, and of whom is Christ as concerning the flesh" (Rom 9:1-5).

Here, as elsewhere, Paul is a man of contrasts. His depth of feeling could show itself in fierce indignation and bitter denunciation, overwhelming his antagonists. "Beware of the dogs, beware of the evil workers, beware of the concision." "Such men are false apostles, deceitful workers, fashioning themselves into apostles of Christ. And no marvel; for even Satan fashioneth himself into an angel of light." "If any man preacheth unto you any gospel other than that which ye received, let him be anathema" (Phil 3:2; 2 Cor 11:13, 14; Gal 1:9). Yet side by side with this he shows the greatest tenderness and patience and personal humility. In the very midst of the rebuke of his Galatians he calls out to them, "My little children, of whom I am again in travail until Christ be formed in you" (Gal 4:19). In the same section in which he writes so sternly to the Corinthians, he declares: "I seek not yours, but you: for the children ought not to lay up for the parents, but the parents for the children. And I will most gladly spend and be spent for your souls" (2 Cor 12:14, 15). Nor could anything suggest a more beautiful relation than the passage addressed to the Thessalonians where he speaks of his relation to them as being like that of a father with his sons, a nurse with her own children (1 Thess 2:7-12). Equally attractive is the picture of his unselfish devotion, that weighs him down at the thought of their sorrow, and makes him forget his own troubles in the joy over their welfare: "Ye are our glory and our joy. Now we live, if ye stand fast in the Lord. For what thanksgiving can we render again unto God for you, for all the joy wherewith we joy for your sakes before our God?" (1 Thess 2:20; 3:8, 9).

Of Paul's tact and thoughtfulness and courtesy, mention has already been made. We have yet to speak of him as a friend. The traditional view pictures Paul as a stern and lonely man, pursuing his solitary task as he traverses land and sea. Nothing could be farther from the truth. He could stand alone when needed, but that was the measure of his courage and devotion, not the sign of his desire. One is surprised in counting up the names of his associates and friends that appear in his letters. They are here by the score. They appear first of all as the companions of his journeys and assistants in the supervision of his churches. Barnabas is the first of these whom we meet. Titus, Timothy, Silas, and Luke are others. Paul looked for young men especially to help him in this work.

They were not subordinate officials to the great apostle. They were his friends, his sons, and he pours the wealth of his affection Upon them. How considerate he was of them is shown, for example, by his thoughtful treatment of Epaphroditus (Phil 2:25-30), and by the letter with which he sent Onesimus back to Philemon. And the letters show how this strong man craved the sympathy and companionship of these coworkers. In addition to these were the associates whom Paul found in every place where he remained any length of time for work. Of these too there is a long list: Lydia of Philippi, whose guest Paul was; Priscilla and Aquila, of tried devotion; Stephanas, Paul's first convert in Corinth; Philemon, convert and friend and prospective host; Rufus of Ephesus, whose mother was a mother to Paul; and with them many others.

It is not hard to understand how Paul drew such people to himself. It was because the love which was central in his teaching was also central in his life. No one quality of the Christian life was so emphasized by Paul in his writings. For him it was the supreme element in the Christian character. At the same time it was the very life of the Christian fellowship. It was not organization and officers that made the church with Paul, but the indwelling spirit of Christ which was love. So love is "the bond of perfectness" for the individual as for the church. "Put on therefore, as God's elect, holy and beloved, a heart of compassion, kindness, lowliness, meekness, longsuffering; forbearing one other, and forgiving each other, if any have a complaint against any; even as the Lord forgave you, so also do ye; and above all these things put on love, which is the bond of perfectness" (Col 3:12-14). Such fine exhortations come again and again, finding their fitting climax in the great chapter on love (1 Cor 13). And all this teaching is but the expression of the apostle's own spirit.

Such was Paul the man, the most human figure, next to Jesus, that the New Testament or the whole Bible brings to us. It is this intensely human character that has made him so attractive to those who have really come to know him. In his words echo the deepest needs of the human heart, its cries and its despair. He shows us our aspirations too, man aiming at the highest. He makes us feel that we too may die to sin and live to God and so run as to attain. And yet there is no cold flawlessness about him. This man of deep passions and broad sympathies and human weakness and need lived upon our own earth. "Not that I have already attained, or am already made perfect: but I press on."

Directions for Reading and Study

Find in Romans or Galatians a chapter which illustrates Paul's power of thought or argument.

Select three scenes from Acts which illustrate Paul's self-possession or strength of will.

Name two letters which show Paul as a friend, and mark several appropriate passages in each.

Make a list of friends and associates of Paul as given in Romans, First Corinthians, Philippians, and Colossians. Note that these names occur regularly in the closing chapter.

From the book of Acts find the names of one or more companions of Paul for each of his missionary journeys, his last trip to Jerusalem, and his voyage to Rome.