What Paul Meant

Garry Wills' What Paul Meant

Garry Wills' What Paul Meant is, oddly enough, a Christian book that (at least in my view of it) suggests that my last post, Only Natural, is not as un-Christian as it may seem. In it, I confessed to no longer harboring what I take to be the canonical Christian view that (human) nature needs correcting.

According to that view, the world is a "fallen" one. Our inner nature is too. It's the fallout of Adam and Eve's original sin in the Garden of Eden.

If I read Wills right — and I am by no means sure I do — the Apostle Paul, author of many of the "letters" that make up the bulk of the New Testament and which document the original Christian movement as it existed before it even bore that name — may actually have had the opposite view. The Christian churches down through the centuries may have simply misread Paul.

The heart of the problem is this [Wills writes on pp. 172-173]. Paul entered the bloodstream of Western civilization through one artery, the vein carrying a consciousness of sin, of guilt, of the tortured conscience. This is the Paul that we came to know through the brilliant self-examinations of Augustine and Luther, of Calvin and Pascal and Kierkegaard. The profound writings of these men and their followers, with all their vast influence, amount to a massive misreading of Paul, to a historic misleading of the minds of people ... down through the centuries.

In this context Wills, who is Catholic, applauds the insights of Lutheran Bishop Krister Stendhal, whose 1961 lecture "The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West" maintained

that Luther and his followers took Paul's argument for freedom from the externals of the [ancient Jewish] Mosaic code as a confession of his [Paul's] own ability to follow moral law in general. They read as autobiography Paul's exclamation at Romans 7:22-24: "In my inner self, I am pleased with God's Law. But I observe another law in my limbs doing battle with the law in my mind, holding me prisoner to the law of sin in my limbs. Miserable person that I am, who is to set me free from this body doomed to death?" These words echoed thunderously in depths of generations for whom they are an autobiographical outcry.

Wills shows that Paul did not mean these words to be taken as autobiographical. For one thing, the idea of secular individualism which exploded during the centuries after Paul's death would not have been recognized by Paul. Paul was not concerned with individual salvation. He was concerned with the salvation of nations.

To Paul, the Brotherhood which would only later become a church was the Body of Christ. As a corporate body, it would be rescued from the manifold iniquities of this world by a gracious God, simply because this was God's plan as revealed by Jesus's death and resurrection.

Paul simply would not have understood the idea that an individual's personal sense of guilt has anything to do with the prospect of corporate salvation. Wills (pp. 173-174) interprets Bishop Stendhal as saying

In all of Paul's undoubtedly autobiographical references, there is no expression of guilt. Far from finding it hard to observe the Mosaic Law, he [having been born a Jew and still considering himself one] says that he observed it perfectly in his days as a Pharisee ... and in his days among the Brothers [i.e., the original followers of Jesus] he says repeatedly that he has done nothing for which his conscience could reproach him ... . [Stendhal's reading is that] in this one place [Romans 7:22-24] he is not telling us about himself.

Paul's Letter to the Romans is, says Wills, after Stendhal, "a complex interplay of 'persons' in diatribe-exchanges, meant to show that Gentiles and Jews — not as individuals but as societies — have both failed to observe their covenant with God." One of these two hypothetical "persons," a personification of the Jews as a historical group, is the implied speaker of the oft-quoted words at Romans 7:22-24, castigating "himself" for his centuries-long history of infractions against the Law of Moses.

Likewise, Paul has it that Gentiles, while not subject to the Jewish covenant, were subject to the covenant of natural law as it is written in their hearts. But like the Jews, they as a body had repeatedly broken their covenant.


In the early Roman proto-church, the Jews who counted Jesus as their Messiah and the Gentiles who likewise counted Jesus as (yes) the Jewish Messiah were nevertheless at odds with each other. "Paul is arguing," says Wills, "that neither side can reproach the other, and that God is on neither side."

So Paul was not addressing personal sin/guilt at all. And Paul and Jesus both said

that the worship of God is a matter of interior love, not based on external observances, on temples or churches, on hierarchies or priesthoods. Both were at odds with those who impose the burdens of "religion" and punish those who try to escape them. ... They saw only two basic moral duties, love of God and love of neighbor. ... Paul's message to us is not one of guilt and dark constraint" (p. 175, emphasis added).

My interpretation of that is the following conjecture: our modern need to "correct" nature stems from the sense of "guilt and dark constraint" which — Paul's intent notwithstanding — got built into the Christian sensibility from the early days of the post-Pauline church on.

In Wills' own terse words (p. 175), "Religion took over the legacy of Paul as it did that of Jesus."

Perhaps my coming to see this, however inchoately, is why I no longer feel comfortable thinking of myself as a partaker of the Christian religion.