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Summary

PAUL’S OWN conversion experience and his mystical ascension form the basis of his theology. His language shows the marks of a man who has learned the vocabulary of the day for expressing a theophany when he was a Pharisee and then received several theophanies as he became a Christian. First and foremost, Paul’s visionary life allowed him to develop a concept of the divinity of the Christ or Messiah in a way that was both a unique development within the Jewish mystical tradition, and at the same time, characteristically Christian. Second, he also used this Jewish mystical vocabulary to express the transformation that happens to believers. They warrant immortality because they have been transformed by becoming formed like (symmorphous) the savior. Next, he used the language of transformation, gained through contact with Jewish mysticalapocalypticism and presumably through ecstatic conversion, to discuss the ultimate salvation and fulfillment of the apocalypse, raising believers to immortality in a parallel process of redemption. Last, this tandem process was visible in the new community through it liturgical life, its missionary efforts, and its brave endurance of suffering.

Resurrection, especially in parenetic contexts, refers to the future life in which the believer will share the image that Christ now possesses.63 Thus, Paul’s resurrection language allowed the community of believers to describe their present experience. They were the community of those who would experience the resurrection which Jesus had already attained. Further, Paul believed that he was not only part of the community to achieve eternal life, as Daniel 12 predicted, but one of those who made others wise and who would shine as the stars in heaven. He and the community of the faithful would soon become angels in heaven at the last trumpet, perhaps even to share in the final judgment as angels, which was what the Qumran community thought.

For Paul the reward was not based on the empty tomb nor was it a belief in a proposition. It is the experience of transformation from mortality to immortality in the real presence of the Spirit of the risen Lord, which in turn, guaranteed his intercession in heaven and the coming transformation of those who believed in him. This is quite different from the narration that the Gospels offer us. In Paul’s writings, we have a record of the Church’s experience illuminated by his personal experience and continuing relationship with his savior. He was clear about the distinction between what was already evident inwardly although it was not yet evident outwardly, and why the inward and the outward processes are the same. The Gospels have no such distinction. His writing on this subject was close to that of mystic visionaries. The Gospels present no such separations. They rather present the story of Jesus’ life from the point of view of an outside observer, though they are imbued with the perspective of a believer. They rather resemble apocalyptic writings.

This is an extraordinary picture of one man’s religious affirmation of the transcendent nature of human life. It is also an enormous engine for conversion in the Hellenistic world. By connecting the internal process of transformation with the world’s redemption Paul was able to suggest that faith had a material and spiritual effect upon the world. Paul was also able successfully to bridge and fuse the world of Jewish mysticism/apocalypticism with the world of pagan spirituality. To do so, he developed a notion of a self in transformation which attained transcendent status at the end of time but was continuously realizing it in the present. So while it was the body that is resurrected it was not merely the body; it was the body which included a divine consciousness, the Spirit, which was redeeming the world. It was a picture of the self that said one could remake the world from what it is into what it should be, all by perfecting the self.

Previously we have seen that religious myth provides an analogy between the self and divinity. In Paul’s writing