Paul | The Theologian

Transcript

00:00:00:28 – 00:00:22:33
Michael Gewecke
Hello friends, and welcome back to the Past Talk podcast. Glad to have you with us again for another conversation here about the Apostle Paul today. We’re turning the frame a little bit. We’re moving on from our more historical, somewhat biographical conversation that we had last time. If you missed that, definitely pause this jump over, give that a listen.

00:00:22:51 – 00:00:50:24
Michael Gewecke
But today we’re going to turn our attention. We’re going to look at Paul from just a little bit of a different angle. We’re going to consider him as a theologian. And before you skip off, because this that sounds boring, I promise you, this is going to be a fascinating look at Paul because today the Christian church, which has now existed for several thousand years, has been built upon the theology Logical bridge.

00:00:50:24 – 00:01:19:31
Michael Gewecke
Really. You might even say the innovation that the Apostle Paul did in the earliest days of the church. We’re going to look at some of his most important writings, how those were significant for the early church, and then how Paul’s been returned to actually Clint throughout history and has been reheard by generations of Christians and in the midst of that has discovered even greater depth and wisdom to what this man wrote and has been given to us throughout the scriptures.

00:01:19:58 – 00:01:52:57
Clint Loveall
Paul’s a fascinating man. He’s very well rounded, at least from the context of the faith. He he can preach, he can teach. We talked last week in our conversation about the the missionary passion that he has, the zeal with which he pursues spreading the faith and sharing the good news of Jesus. Today. We’re really kind of narrow on the idea of Paul as a as a thinker, as an intellectual, his contributions of thought to the church.

00:01:52:57 – 00:02:22:03
Clint Loveall
And in some ways he’s uniquely suited to do that. He’s well positioned in the early church. We mentioned that Paul was a lifelong Jew. He’s a Pharisee. So Paul has hundreds of thousands of hours of being thoughtful about the faith and about the role of law, about what it means to be faithful, what it means to be righteous, and his ability to convert these themes into a Christian framework.

00:02:22:03 – 00:02:45:28
Clint Loveall
When Paul discovers the truth of Christ, when that’s when the Gospel connects with Paul and Jesus claims him, Paul immediately begins to go to work, assimilating these former ideas and trying to understand what they now mean. In Paul, I want to be very clear on the outset, Michael, for people, Paul in no way thinks he’s doing a new thing right.

00:02:45:28 – 00:03:13:44
Clint Loveall
Paul thinks he has now understood something of the culmination of Judaism, the culmination of the covenant. Paul doesn’t think he’s replacing something. He thinks he’s following it through to its conclusion and his ability to do that. He is uniquely suited for that and he’s remarkably good at it, at least to whatever extent we can evaluate that from 2000 years after the fact.

00:03:14:06 – 00:03:42:39
Clint Loveall
The scriptures that we’re left with, the writings of Paul, give us evidence of a really a deep thought for careful thinker in most regards, and we should probably say on the front end. Michael, there’s an interesting biblical argument about what Paul did and didn’t write in the New Testament. There are people that think Paul wrote all of the books with his name on it.

00:03:43:01 – 00:04:16:51
Clint Loveall
There’s some other people who question whether some of those books, for purposes of our conversation, if it has Paul’s name on it, we’re going to attribute it to that school of thought. We’re going to tribute to Paul, although I should also say that where we’re going to draw from most are places that are not really question. They’re letters that people don’t really put on the we don’t think Paul wrote this list of letters like Romans letters like Galatians are generally and genuinely considered to be Paul’s work.

00:04:16:51 – 00:04:21:03
Clint Loveall
And that’s that’s mostly the that’s mostly the place we’ll go.

00:04:21:19 – 00:04:49:46
Michael Gewecke
Yeah. Well then part of that, Clinton, is because of the fact that, you know, biblical scholars are looking here at very fine details and they’re looking at style, tone, vocabulary, language. And those are important and even sometimes very interesting conversations to have. But the point that we’re going to make today is that there is actually remarkable consistency in what Paul has to say to the different churches that he writes, even to different contexts and different relationships to those churches.

00:04:50:04 – 00:05:16:22
Michael Gewecke
Paul does have some very strong themes that we see time and again and, you know, one of those themes that Paul writes, which I think, Clint, if we’re going to be honest, modern Christians, we just struggle to really understand the weight of this problem. We struggle because at the end of the day, the majority of Christians statistically in the world today are not Jewish in their heritage.

00:05:16:22 – 00:06:01:03
Michael Gewecke
And so because of that, the the church has this sort of latent assumption just by our own experience, that this is the way it’s always been. But that’s not. And we have to remind ourselves over and over again, that is not the church that Paul entered into after his Damascus Road experience, which we talked about. He literally enters the church and he goes to synagogue to debate the faith with both believing and non believing Jews all the way up to 70 A.D. The church was this incubator of the Christian faith, and in fact, those outside of the Christian church talked about Christians as a sect of Judaism.

00:06:01:15 – 00:06:27:55
Michael Gewecke
This is we have historical record of this. So the problem presented here then for Paul is what do you do theologically with the people of Israel, the covenant bearers, the ones that God made a promise to and said that you will be my people? What do you do when the Spirit of God begins working Clearly outside the bounds of that covenant people as it had been historically understood?

00:06:28:17 – 00:07:05:31
Michael Gewecke
And Paul in the letter like what he writes to the Roman church, we get really the best sort of through line or the best full account of how Paul wrestled with that question. And we’ll talk a little bit about the ups and downs and the context of that question. But I just want to start this section here. When Paul’s dealing with the theological question of the Gentile and the Jew, the in and the out, the elected ones and the unelected ones, when Paul deals with these topics and issues, it is not for fun, It’s not a whimsical sort of taking a little bit of time to work it out.

00:07:05:31 – 00:07:18:52
Michael Gewecke
This is the premier theological problem of the day, and quite frankly, it’s Paul’s answer to some of those problems that become the dominant, thoroughgoing way that the church understands itself into the future.

00:07:19:13 – 00:07:55:08
Clint Loveall
And it’s difficult to speak with confidence of exactly how this happens. But the most likely scenario is, again, Paul encounters the gospel. Paul is met with this language that Jesus Christ, the awaited Messiah, has come to set people free from their sins. That unlike the expectation that Jesus would be, that the Messiah would be a military conqueror, the Messiah fills a spiritual role to save people from their sin.

00:07:55:35 – 00:08:40:08
Clint Loveall
And Paul, as a lifelong Jew, thinks of that in terms of righteousness and atonement of obedience, and now this message of grace. And as Paul begins to process all of this, what he begins to suspect is that the Gospel has done something not just for those within the Jewish circle. It has offered something to the world. If if Jesus is the fundamental solution to the fundamental problem of human sin, then for Paul that begins to appear bigger than the covenant to just the Jewish people.

00:08:40:30 – 00:09:17:13
Clint Loveall
It begins to appear universal for everyone. And it is this thinking. It is the idea that the problem of sin is not specifically a Jewish problem, it is a human problem, and that Jesus is the sum total answer. The conquerer of human sin that begins to help Paul initially lower those barriers and tear down those walls that he has historically believed in that separate Jew from Gentile.

00:09:17:38 – 00:09:45:45
Clint Loveall
And we don’t have an exact moment of this. We don’t know if this comes as a process of years of thinking or if it’s a watershed moment all at once. But this belief becomes the driving belief of Paul’s gospel. It we we talked last week how it it was the impetus. It did shape his missionary journey. It shaped some of his arguments with Jewish Christians who hadn’t gotten there yet.

00:09:46:03 – 00:09:59:56
Clint Loveall
And for Paul, this really becomes the the note that he sounds most clearly, Michael. And it it is related to other things that we’ll talk about. But he gets there theologically. And I think that matters.

00:09:59:56 – 00:10:44:06
Michael Gewecke
You have to recognize the surprising turn that happens for someone that has been inside the Jewish theological understanding that the covenantal relationship model, this idea that that the Jews are the chosen people. And so when Paul comes to see the revelation of Jesus, that is like having the rug pulled out from underneath you. Because when you begin to see the Spirit of God spreading like wildfire throughout the Gentile world, and you begin to understand, as Paul does in his pastoral letters, which we’ll talk more about next week, that he’s now having to deal with things that he had taken for granted his entire life.

00:10:44:06 – 00:11:07:21
Michael Gewecke
Things like food codes now had to be reappraised. They had to be reconsidered because is that a thing that Gentiles should be held to or in grace and within the fold of the people of God in Jesus Christ? Are there some things which can be left behind and understood to be within the Jewish community, but not the Gentile Christian community?

00:11:07:21 – 00:11:35:43
Michael Gewecke
And so the thing I want to left out here is at one hand are on one hand Paul is preaching and seeing a gospel that expands the horizon of who’s included by several folds simultaneously. He’s creating a litmus or a litany excuse me, of problems, of questions about then how do we live, and then how do we understand these things that we understood.

00:11:35:43 – 00:12:13:26
Michael Gewecke
Like, for instance, the fact that a God is a just God, and that in the face of a righteous God, that we cannot stand as sinful people? Well, now, Paul turns to that and he reexamines in light of Jesus Christ who stood before a righteous God as a righteous human, He saw in the cross a way for us to understand that the humanity, not just the Jewish community elected, but rather all of humanity, if they might, but have faith in that God, in Jesus Christ at work, that that salvific circle could expand beyond what had been understood.

00:12:13:26 – 00:12:40:08
Michael Gewecke
And so this is both a gift. It both enables a wider and broader understanding of God’s work in the world, which will only happen because of Jesus Christ, but also it does cause several problems down the way that gospel creates several other problems. And we find in other letters, quite frankly, other gospels that spin out of it that Paul actually addresses almost directly.

00:12:40:08 – 00:13:07:06
Michael Gewecke
So it’s a fascinating revelation that that’s coming and it’s being done. You know, maybe we should say, Clint, it’s not all Paul Paul’s talking with Peter. And we know that those conversations are happening amongst other leaders. So just because we have a substantial portion of Pauline writing doesn’t mean that Paul’s the only one. But we have to recognize by sheer quantity of his work in the Bible, Paul’s a substantial voice in that conversation.

00:13:08:01 – 00:13:44:31
Clint Loveall
Yeah, absolutely. And it moves fairly quickly. You know, we go relatively briefly through the idea that the God of Israel sent Jesus to Israel, to Paul and others, giving the idea of sharing the idea that they believe they’ve discerned that God of Israel has invited Gentiles into the covenant, that they too, are included in the work of the Messiah.

00:13:44:31 – 00:14:13:53
Clint Loveall
And to us, that sounds like a fairly simple thing. Well, good Gentiles can be included. And to the church’s credit, though, there was some argument, you know, Peter and the other disciples in Jerusalem relatively quickly. There’s an openness to that. Now. There were some bumps in the road, but historically speaking, they moved that direction rather fast. However, now you have another entire set of questions.

00:14:13:53 – 00:14:44:02
Clint Loveall
When a Gentile becomes a Christian, when a Gentile is now folded into that covenant of the God of Israel, do they need to be circumcised? Do they need to keep the diet laws? Do they need to keep the Sabbath laws? Do they functionally live now as a Jewish person? And this for Paul again becomes an intellectual conundrum. He begins to think through, well, what does it mean?

00:14:44:25 – 00:15:17:36
Clint Loveall
Does it mean that the Gentiles have become Jewish or does it mean they have been enfolded into the grace of Christ and he begins to get concerned that if additional barriers are placed on the Gentiles, what that means theologically is that the people then come to put their trust in things like circumcision and diet more than the cross, or at the very least they hold those things equally important with the cross, which for Paul is unthinkable.

00:15:17:56 – 00:15:58:39
Clint Loveall
Nothing else but the cross can be primary. And so even his very theological underpinning leads him to believe that the things he once considered extremely important are now preferences. They’re now personal decisions, but they’re not incumbent upon those who come into the faith. They are no longer defining characteristics because Jesus alone is the defining characteristic of what it means to be God fearing, of what it means to be included in the covenant, what it means to be faithful.

00:15:58:39 – 00:16:28:55
Clint Loveall
And so we hear words like righteous and holy and atonement and sin and and we have so thoroughly vetted those within Christianity that we forget that they weren’t initially our words. Paul. Paul brought them with him. The apostles, the disciples, the writers of Scripture brought those words with them. And Christians began to rethink and reimagine what they meant to us in light of Christ.

00:16:28:55 – 00:16:57:12
Clint Loveall
And and Paul, I think, Michael, we just I yes, others were doing it. Yes, there are other parts of the Scripture that contribute to that conversation. Paul is leading the charge, yet Paul is far and away the driving force in that conversation. I think both practically through the lens of the story and certainly theologically from the writings we have left.

00:16:57:12 – 00:17:16:08
Michael Gewecke
Yeah, I think that’s fair to say. And I think that there are numerous places in Scripture where one could turn to have this conversation. So I just picked one, to be honest with you. But to throw up here in our screen, that’s not working. So I’ll just read it to you. What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound?

00:17:16:08 – 00:17:50:20
Michael Gewecke
That’s Romans chapter six, verse one, and there’s an inherent problem that’s been created by Paul’s insistence upon grace. And you see it there. If grace is this free thing given to all people, if grace is Jesus Christ’s gift to us, undeserved, unearned, then wouldn’t you think that continuing on doing whatever sinful thing might we want to do, wouldn’t that just then create more opportunities for the grace of Jesus Christ to live in our life?

00:17:50:20 – 00:18:20:25
Michael Gewecke
In other words, wouldn’t the removal of all boundaries be the natural outcome of essentially the boundary of this covenantal relationship of the people of Israel being pushed back to all people? It shouldn’t all of the boundaries go with it. Is that the expansive nature of the gospel? And Paul, you know, as we know, if you’ve read the Scripture goes on and says by no means, in no way does Grace invalidate God’s entire plan.

00:18:20:34 – 00:18:45:48
Michael Gewecke
Paul To your point, Clint, I think this is this needs to be stated. Paul did not see himself as making a new faith. He did not think of himself as going in and innovating a new religion for him. He deeply believed and held, I think, throughout his entire life that reality of what it meant to be Jewish, to be blessed, to be the covenant bearers out in that community.

00:18:46:04 – 00:19:17:07
Michael Gewecke
And then he saw in Jesus Christ the fulfillment of that covenant that like a cup overflowing, spilled into the world that God did for the nation. Israel What God promised, and that when God did it, He surprised everybody by showering all with the very grace that God had from the beginning offered to God’s own people. Paul, I think, in other words, sees himself in a moment of God doing above and beyond what had anyone had ever expected.

00:19:17:22 – 00:19:43:28
Michael Gewecke
And that is, I think the beautiful nature of Paul is that he’s writing to these churches and trying to communicate. I think the substantial change and transformation of the world’s previous imagination of what God was doing, while also simultaneously saying that doesn’t invalidate being people of the covenant, that doesn’t invalidate having morality and ethics and following God’s way.

00:19:43:40 – 00:20:02:27
Michael Gewecke
It does shape and change how we understand some of those things in the culture that the gospel is proclaimed. But Paul is not in any level saying that lawlessness is the new form of the gospel. He’s just suggesting that Jesus Christ has fulfilled the law and that changes everything.

00:20:02:54 – 00:20:42:09
Clint Loveall
Yeah. And and for Paul, that doesn’t mean all bets are off. Do what you want. In fact, just the opposite. Paul has extremely high standards, but he gets there in a different way. He essentially begins to believe and begins to teach and preach and flesh out in his writings that unlike a covenant of law where the idea is we live ourself up to righteousness, we have been given, we are recipients of a covenant of grace where we are given righteousness first and now we live out of it.

00:20:42:27 – 00:21:11:25
Clint Loveall
We, we, we are not trying to earn the goodness of God given to us because that’s already been received. We are trying to reflect that. And I think for Paul that is at least as serious an undertaking. I think for Paul, there’s no there’s no difference in the debt that places us in. There’s no difference in the intensity with which we ought to pursue that.

00:21:11:47 – 00:21:41:49
Clint Loveall
The difference is we’re just we’re not doing it so that we can be saved. We’re doing it because we have already been saved through faith in Jesus Christ. And I think the other thing, Michael, that is important to just maybe touch on is like all people who write, Paul writes for his time, right? Paul doesn’t understand himself to be writing theological guidelines for the Western Church of the next 2000 years.

00:21:42:19 – 00:22:28:30
Clint Loveall
Paul doesn’t understand himself to be writing what will become the underpinnings of the Reformation. But Paul is writing a letter to a church in Rome doing his best to explain how he and they should understand this incredible, amazing, mysterious thing that God has done using the Son of God and a Roman Cross in the context of Jewish faith that transcends all of it and imparts the goodness and saving merciful forgiveness of God into human hearts.

00:22:28:30 – 00:23:04:35
Clint Loveall
I mean, Paul is making no grand statement other than trying to wrap his head in heart around the good news of Jesus Christ and help others see it and live it. The fact that his words hold up through the centuries, the fact that we still week in and week out in the Christian church, open our Bibles to those 2000 year old words and try to apply them and understand them and preach from them and teach from them and read devotionals from them.

00:23:04:53 – 00:23:26:20
Clint Loveall
That is a testament to the depth that he gave those ideas and I think to the creativity and the logic and the just the the sheer brilliance of what he was able to do. But he he didn’t do it thinking that’s what he was doing. And I think that matters.

00:23:26:45 – 00:24:05:02
Michael Gewecke
It does matter because ultimately Scripture is God’s work. And these things that the church identified very early on, these writings that they said this has the force of formation, it has the force of guidance within the Christian community. And the fact that they move so quickly to hand this off one generation to the next and say this is reliable, you will find in this the good news is because Paul, in his unceasing effort, his zeal, his passion to to follow wherever Jesus Christ may lead, he kept his focus on the risen Christ.

00:24:05:02 – 00:24:29:29
Michael Gewecke
And it’s that force and movement which in some of his letters he makes explicit that goal that we find the same movement within our spirits, our hearts as modern readers and modern us students of these words. We discover in them the power and transformation of of the living Spirit of God to actually move us into the same kind of path in our own life.

00:24:29:29 – 00:24:53:34
Michael Gewecke
And, you know, I think that it’s easy to turn to a book like Romans or Galatians to read words like Grace, Faith. We find those almost ho hum because they have become so a part of the Christian dictionary. These are things that if you have had any engagement in church, whether that be the worshiping life of a church or whether that be in Sunday school of some kind, you’ve heard these words.

00:24:53:52 – 00:25:18:25
Michael Gewecke
The danger of that is inoculation, that you got just enough of it to think you know what it means and not enough of it to know how much bigger and more expansive it is than you could possibly imagine. And Clint, that is, I think, a place where the church has failed as stewards of these New Testament text as we read things like Paul in in Romans.

00:25:18:25 – 00:25:43:54
Michael Gewecke
I think the moment that we think that we have defined the boundaries of Paul’s understanding of Jesus Christ, I think that we are in danger of missing the much more expansive vision that he had of Jesus Christ, the Jesus who surprises us, the Jesus who shows up with grace that extends beyond the boundaries that we thought existed. And you know, yeah, be careful with that also, Right.

00:25:43:55 – 00:26:06:48
Michael Gewecke
Because Paul are clearly doesn’t enter into the conversation thinking that the gospel has no boundaries or that there’s no call upon the life of the believer. He does. He makes love explicit. But then on the other hand, it’s easy, I think, to read Paul, to think you read the words and to pass on past the Christian vocabulary and miss the real depth that’s happening here.

00:26:07:03 – 00:26:17:38
Michael Gewecke
The transformational identity changing type work that Paul’s calling us to. And if we slow down and if we read carefully, these words have the power to change lives.

00:26:18:00 – 00:26:54:18
Clint Loveall
Yeah. And keep in mind that these words didn’t exist in a vacuum. There were other people saying things about Jesus. There were other people writing things about Jesus and yet time and time again, when the church, when, when the body of those trying to follow Christ gave themselves to these words, they found them superior to the others. There’s a there’s a reason Paul has been transmitted and kept and held on and canonized, and those other voices had fallen by the wayside.

00:26:54:19 – 00:27:53:07
Clint Loveall
Because when the church, by the guidance of the Holy Spirit, submitted themselves and revisited these words over and over again, they continued to find Jesus in them. They continued to hear the gospel in them. They continued to gain clarity of the thing God had done. And and maybe we can move there, Michael, if we if you know, it’s in some ways it’s difficult to pin Paul down, but in other ways, I think he’s so strongly comes from this emphasis, this idea of grace that we really, I think, can fairly say it is the foundation of his theology, the idea that in the cross of Christ, we see the gift of God to the world, that

00:27:53:07 – 00:28:22:31
Clint Loveall
we see the atonement, the penalty, the payment for our sin, so that we can be redeemed and that that grace has been offered to us. And we access that grace not by faithfulness to a religion, not by jumping legal hoops, not by checking boxes and not checking other boxes, but by simply accepting by placing our faith in that work.

00:28:23:09 – 00:28:53:15
Clint Loveall
We have access to that saving grace that that it lives within us as our new reality, because God has chosen us to hear it, to respond to it, to be a part of it. God has invited us and and that we access we accept that invitation by simply acknowledging the truth of it. We don’t have to do anything.

00:28:53:15 – 00:29:11:56
Clint Loveall
In fact, it’s very important for Paul that we can’t do anything. We can’t earn it. We can’t give our resume, we can’t pay enough, we can’t do enough. It is a gift. And I think if we’re going to understand Paul very well, I think that almost has to be the place you start.

00:29:12:16 – 00:29:35:00
Michael Gewecke
Well, it has to be the place you start. Because remember that day of the day, Paul’s arguing that it’s not your people group that defines your inclusion with the people of God. And in his understanding, growing up, the people group defined what you did, define what you ate and how you slept and how you behaved in public and what you did on the seventh day of the week.

00:29:35:00 – 00:30:07:33
Michael Gewecke
All of these things were innate to being the people of God. But when Paul discovers the atonement, the justifying work of Jesus Christ, which is spilling over into the lives of the entire world, into the very Gentiles that the Jewish people define themselves against. When Paul saw that work happening, he realized that it couldn’t possibly be defined by the actions of the human, but rather by the action of the one true human who is Jesus Christ.

00:30:07:33 – 00:30:36:01
Michael Gewecke
And so this this framework of grace that we see in these Pauline letters is transformative, not only in Paul’s own imagination and in life, and not only for the church of his time, but for the church of all times. And in fact, it’s this idea of grace that the church later comes upon again. You would think you would have been revolutionary enough in the beginning that that it would just continue on.

00:30:36:01 – 00:31:02:09
Michael Gewecke
But the truth is that this concept of the grace of Jesus Christ, the gift that is given, not earned, not affected by human action, this is the thing that Martin Luther picks up in the Reformation, and he begins a conversation which returns to Paul, also returns to some of the earlier church theologians and he found in them resonances of Paul.

00:31:02:25 – 00:31:30:07
Michael Gewecke
But he discovers again and amplifies again in his own time the reality that humans are not saved by the gifts that they give. They’re not saved by the places that they go. They’re not saved by the things that they pray to. They are saved by the living grace of Jesus Christ in their life. A thing that, as you said very well, Clint is recognized, not a thing that is taken or a thing that is acquired.

00:31:30:28 – 00:31:56:00
Michael Gewecke
And it is that conversation that spins out that Luther himself, I think, didn’t think of that conversation as one being a split from the church at the start, but rather a renovation of the church. His understanding, a return to Paul’s understanding. But as we know historically that turned into this this reformation turned into an actual church movement. And then that movement turned into churches of different kinds.

00:31:56:22 – 00:32:24:25
Michael Gewecke
And it led to a whole season of renewal, of theological exploration, of biblical interpretation, in which once again, the the idea of grace and asking the question, does grace live beyond the boundaries of what we had imagined before was brought again to the table. And quite frankly, there was some incredible and even surprising insights gained again a thousand plus years later.

00:32:24:32 – 00:32:56:18
Clint Loveall
Yeah, we continue to visit those themes. We continue to unpack them. We continue to struggle with the tension between free gift and responsibility of law and grace, of faith and works. We continue to try and flesh out literally what is of Christ in those conversations. And each and every time we do that, the Church has returned to Paul to guide us in those discussions.

00:32:56:40 – 00:33:36:19
Clint Loveall
We haven’t always agreed on what Paul says or what Paul meant, but we have always looked to Paul as one of the primary voices whenever we’ve sought to answer some of those questions. And for Paul, that reality, the reality that we are, we are enable, we are ineffective, we are lost, hopeless in our sin. And yet, in spite of that, God has offered us of his own free will, of His own free choice, the gift of his own son.

00:33:37:31 – 00:34:00:55
Clint Loveall
Not that we have to do anything for. We don’t have to be Jewish. We don’t have to do this. We don’t have to do that. We don’t have to. Whatever. But we we receive that as a gift and that God has done that for no other reason than God wants to, that it is the nature of God to say that it is the fulfillment of God’s plan.

00:34:01:53 – 00:34:30:23
Clint Loveall
That’s the heart of Paul. Everything else that Paul does, if you want to look at the decisions he makes about churches, if you want to look at the decisions he makes about issues and the various things that he has to deal with each and every one for, Paul ties back to that central theme of what does this have to do with the essential truth of Jesus Christ?

00:34:30:23 – 00:34:55:49
Clint Loveall
And I think, you know, you don’t have to agree with Paul in regard to all of those various issues. Michael, To see that for Paul there is a connection. It’s Paul is never far from the cross. It is for him the lens through which he sees every problem. And sometimes, sometimes that makes Paul difficult to read, to be honest.

00:34:55:49 – 00:35:09:01
Clint Loveall
But it is just he is. I think though, I if we could criticize Paul for anything and I don’t know that we can I don’t think it’s for consistency. I think Paul is remarkably consistent.

00:35:09:10 – 00:35:56:43
Michael Gewecke
He is consistent. And, you know, my gut was actually leaning that way to Clint is to say just because Paul may be consistent doesn’t mean that it’s easy to both understand what he means. And also that it’s not easy to apply. And I think that that is a unique aspect of Paul’s theological vision because when you understand grace and you understand how it envelops people, groups who had never even been considered to be in view of the the covenantal God, the God of Israel right now, as that grace has been extended by the atoning work of Jesus Christ to any who has faith, who recognizes the reality of that gift that’s been given for them,

00:35:57:18 – 00:36:21:41
Michael Gewecke
then it creates a whole myriad of practical problems. And I think that we find that here in his turn in Romans Chapter 12, because he says here that we are to present our bodies as a living sacrifice, to not be conformed to the world, be transformed by the renewing of our minds that we might discern the will of God.

00:36:21:41 – 00:36:52:08
Michael Gewecke
Clint, this is the fundamental problem discerning the will of God. Paul may be consistent and his proclamation that grace has changed everything. But as we continue to read Paul, as the Church has done in every generation, we seek see in these words to hear in these words and far more difficult to live with these words in the discernment of how God is working through that gracious action even in our lives today.

00:36:52:08 – 00:37:16:46
Michael Gewecke
And Clint, that is where it gets very messy, because it requires our group of conversations. It requires the church to practice grace with one another, humility. It requires prayer, it requires the study of scripture. It requires all of this messy human interaction while seeking divine guidance. And in the midst of that, recognizing that we’re still going to get it wrong.

00:37:16:46 – 00:37:41:40
Michael Gewecke
Yet that’s the work that Paul is doing and modeling as he seeks to follow Jesus Christ. And it is the task of the church today to model ourselves, to seek to follow in Paul’s way and recognize that, yeah, our theology does need to be consistent, but it also requires discernment. It also requires asking the questions. So then how do we live it today?

00:37:41:51 – 00:38:09:23
Michael Gewecke
How then do we present our bodies today as that living sacrifice wholly acceptable to God? What does that mean? Wherever you live, whatever your vocation is, whatever you consider to be your central place and time, how are you discerning God’s will to be your Lord in this moment? That’s what Paul calls us to. And unfortunately, that’s not just an open, closed that’s not an easy right.

00:38:09:23 – 00:38:13:31
Michael Gewecke
A pamphlet handed out, problem solved discernment takes work.

00:38:14:52 – 00:38:50:31
Clint Loveall
Yeah, and that’s probably a moment, Michael. Or we should admit the obvious that we stand in a tradition that believes ourselves to be deeply influenced and deeply reflective of Paul through the work of Augustine and Luther and Calvin and others. We we lean heavily on the idea that our own theology is is deeply influenced and and deeply reflective of a book like Romans.

00:38:50:54 – 00:39:16:42
Clint Loveall
And so what has that meant for us? It means that we try to be thoughtful. We try to have consistent theology. It means that we value preaching, we value teaching, it means that we value study. It means that we understand that there is a life of the mind required to approach the faith. Now, that’s not enough, but that the faith should be thoughtful.

00:39:16:42 – 00:39:59:11
Clint Loveall
We should be thinking people, not simply experiential Christians, but thoughtful Christians, that those two things should go hand in hand. And what does it say to us that a person like Paul calls us always to a deeper level of faith? What does it mean that Paul calls us to continue to interact with our world? And I think in that sense, we talk about Paul as a theologian and not just in the material he left for us to read, but in the way that he shapes us to be theologians, to be theologically minded, to to study God.

00:39:59:11 – 00:40:23:58
Clint Loveall
The word theology literally means to study God, to study, and not simply like we could put God on a slide in a microscope, but to think about what it means to live as godly people, to think about what it means to pursue faithfulness in Christ, you know, there’s this beautiful picture. I, I understand that there are places that people can criticize, Paul and I.

00:40:24:21 – 00:40:54:21
Clint Loveall
I don’t need Paul doesn’t need me to defend him. But there are some moments, Michael, where I think we see the character of Paul and there’s a story where he goes into city, he preaches, he’s captured, he’s beaten, and he’s he’s throttled. And the next day he goes back, right? I mean, he just he gets up. You you cannot stop Paul from pursuing what he understands to be his mission in Christ.

00:40:54:21 – 00:41:21:28
Clint Loveall
And I respect that. I respect a man who hurting and struggling with his own questions, with his own problems with churches, with people who have betrayed him, with all of the rest, who just gets up every day and says, this day is about how am I going to be faithful to Jesus Christ? And I think if we’re if we give Paul a fair hearing, there’s something deeply commendable in that.

00:41:21:28 – 00:41:44:42
Clint Loveall
And Paul doesn’t get there just because he’s stubborn, he doesn’t get there just because he’s tough. He gets there because he thinks that what matters most in his life is how he responds to the grace that was given to him. He remembers a time where he lived in a way that dishonored God and he now stands in great, full joy.

00:41:45:59 – 00:42:07:21
Clint Loveall
One of the things that surprises people about Paul’s letters is how much there is about rejoicing. He now stands in grateful joy as a recipient of grace, and it colors each and every day of his life. And I think for that alone, we look to Paul for and I think deserves a measure of respect.

00:42:07:57 – 00:42:38:09
Michael Gewecke
Oh, completely. And I think it’s worth noting that though the church has at certain times struggled with the realities of living as theologians like Paul that we have at our best also mimicked Paul’s deepest conviction. And I think it’s worth saying in the conversation about Carl. Paul, you’re Clint. I think we need to remind everyone that Paul was an unbelievably careful reader of Scripture.

00:42:38:31 – 00:43:05:00
Michael Gewecke
Throughout all of his letters, he weaves the old what would be his scriptures. The Old Testament texts are woven throughout. He clearly had committed to memory. He clearly had debated and thought and considered what these ancient and holy words would mean in the life of a contemporary Christian in his day. And he brought the fruit of that for the sake of the church.

00:43:05:00 – 00:43:27:30
Michael Gewecke
And so I think if there’s any takeaway from a conversation about Paul today, we would at some level have to pause and admit that we too are called to be people who study the scriptures that we turn and give real attention to these words because we literally cannot engage in the discernment that Paul models and calls the church to.

00:43:27:48 – 00:43:59:24
Michael Gewecke
If we do not have a deep breathing in the substance of the holy words, if we don’t understand what the Scriptures are pointing us towards and who they are revealing, who they’re pointing us to, if we don’t have that awareness and understanding, then we can not only we will miss what Paul’s trying to say, but we’re also going to miss the entire effort completely because Paul was a person who understood that this is the fundamental ground upon which the seed of the gospel is planted.

00:43:59:24 – 00:44:09:46
Michael Gewecke
It’s the Scriptures, it’s the promise of Jesus Christ. And so if there’s a take away from Paul, the theologian, maybe it’s just read your Bible more or read your Bible at all.

00:44:10:01 – 00:44:37:30
Clint Loveall
I want to be I want to make sure people are clear about what you’re saying. Michael, When when, when we use the phrase, you know, like Paul studied scripture, we don’t simply mean that Paul knew the Bible, which he did, no doubt. But Paul thought biblically, Paul, you said the Scripture and what it taught about the way God is the nature of people, the work of God.

00:44:37:58 – 00:44:56:43
Clint Loveall
He He took that worldview and it became the lens through which he viewed the rest of the world. It became the way he thought. When we talk about studying the Bible, it isn’t just so that we know that this is in the book of Romans, and that’s in the Gospel of John, and that story’s in Genesis. It is.

00:44:56:43 – 00:45:29:06
Clint Loveall
So those stories inform the way we think, the way we live. It is not enough to simply know or read or study scripture. It is an endeavor to think biblically because the Bible shapes our view of our self, our world, and our God. And when we look at the world through it, we have the clearest opportunity to see, to discern is the word we use.

00:45:29:24 – 00:45:51:32
Clint Loveall
What God is doing by knowing what God has done and what God has promised to do. And so I just want I want people to understand that when you as Paul knew his Bible, but that wasn’t what was most impressive. What was most impressive is the way that how Paul knew his Bible informed everything else that Paul sought to know.

00:45:52:01 – 00:46:19:42
Michael Gewecke
Yeah, that’s an unbelievably helpful exploration. That’s exactly what I meant. And I only want to add to what you just said, Clint, that realistically, when Paul comes to explore these words and allow them to to frame his entire world, he’s doing that with an incredibly deep and nuanced selection of texts and understanding of God’s working in the world.

00:46:19:55 – 00:46:59:49
Michael Gewecke
Some of you joined this conversation may have grown up with an understanding of the Christian faith, which is very, very finely pointed, that this is the thing and it’s only this, that this is the only reading. But if you read the Old Testament with the covenant language, with God’s work through David and Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, if you see these characters and then you see four gospel accounts, if you see Paul’s work throughout the work at the Book of Acts, and then you see the ways that he addresses all of these churches, what makes Paul astonishing as a Christian leader is theologically, he can see the core gospel clearly.

00:46:59:49 – 00:47:30:48
Michael Gewecke
He sees Jesus Christ and he seeks to follow Jesus Christ in all things. And also he’s nuanced and also he understands it’s complicated. And also his mind and his spirit are big enough to deal with issues that cannot be held and contained by one person. That is the beautiful tension that Paul represents, that on one hand, he sees all of these things, some of which may seem competing as unified in Jesus Christ.

00:47:31:08 – 00:47:52:28
Michael Gewecke
And also he preaches the simple gospel of Jesus Christ crucified, dead, buried, and rose again for the salvation and atonement of all who believe in him. Clint, this is the beautiful image of Paul that I think that if we live it out, don’t let your faith be calcified. Don’t let it be one simple thing that’s either this or that.

00:47:52:48 – 00:47:57:43
Michael Gewecke
It’s far more robust than that. And I think Paul shows us that in his life and theology.

00:47:57:43 – 00:48:21:14
Clint Loveall
I think that’s a good transition and maybe a good ending spot. Michael, because I think we I think if you can join us for the next conversation when we sort of think about Paul’s as a as a pastor or as a mentor, as a guide, I think it will be surprising. Paul has a measure of flexibility that I think is remarkable as a leader.

00:48:21:32 – 00:48:54:41
Clint Loveall
And while Paul is rigid, strong willed in his theology, those things that are not at the core, core of his understanding of Christ, he is remarkably fluid with if you want to eat this, if you want to, if you do this, if you do it in his theology again, allows him a a looseness that is surprising to people, but it’s not a looseness in his thought.

00:48:54:41 – 00:49:27:36
Clint Loveall
It’s not a looseness in his theology. It’s that Paul understands that outside the core issues of the meaning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, other things have to sort of be settled along the way. And he’s remarkably able and remarkably willing to do that. And I think if you can join us, the interchange between this conversation and that conversation is, I think, one of the most fascinating aspects of looking at Paul through those two lenses as well.

00:49:27:36 – 00:49:45:28
Michael Gewecke
Said. And so maybe the only final word is the best way to make sure that you get those things is that you either subscribe for the emails that come out every week announcing our latest episode. You can also, if you’re on YouTube, subscribe right there. Definitely give this video a like if you found it helpful that helps others find it so that they to enter into the conversation.

00:49:45:59 – 00:50:02:25
Michael Gewecke
But friends, remember how you found us today or how long you’ve been joining us for these conversations. It’s always a privilege that you would give your time to be with us. We hope there’s been something of value here today and we look forward to continuing this exact conversation that Clint leads us into next week.

00:50:02:52 – 00:50:25:48
Clint Loveall
Thanks, everybody. Hey, we want to thank you for listening to this broadcast. We’re grateful for the support and the connections, the relationships we get to make through some of these offerings. We hope that they’ve been helpful. We know that there are lots of choices that you have, lots of things you can listen to. We want to make you aware of some of what we’re doing, and we greatly appreciate you being a part of it.

00:50:26:02 – 00:50:44:54
Michael Gewecke
Absolutely. We want to just thank you for being one of our audio podcast listeners. It’s amazing to have you with us in the midst of our conversations. Of course, I hope you know that you can find the whole archive of all of these conversations at Pastor Taco. We would love for you to join us there. You can find options for subscribing by email.

00:50:45:09 – 00:51:18:32
Michael Gewecke
You can easily share things there with other people who you think might appreciate recordings like this. And of course, we just want to welcome you. If you’re ever interested in joining us for the video podcast, you can do that on YouTube. It is YouTube.com slash AFP Spirit Lake. There you can comment and engage with us, or if you would prefer to do that without going to YouTube, you can actually just click the link in the description of podcast where you will be able to send us form and information and reach out to us.

00:51:18:45 – 00:51:35:33
Michael Gewecke
We’d love to hear from you and engage in conversation with you. Thanks again for taking time to be with us. We look forward to our next conversation and can’t wait to see you then.