I just couldn’t move on from that trouble prone, first century, Jewish misfit mystic, Paul, without a few more words regarding his approach to power.
“Power is made perfect in weakness,” he dramatically declares (2 Cor 12:9). Not bad from a fella who was destined to become arguably the second most important figure ever in the establishment of Christianity. Clearly the first ranking position remains with the God Man from Galilee, who renowned scholar Geza Vermes called a “Galilean Hasid,” (Itinerant Jewish holy man).
Paul is a bottom up not a top down spirituality guy.
This “Power is made perfect in weakness,” refrain of Paul’s, has certainly seen plenty of ink spilled in trying to fathom it! And with very good reason, because it comes from the same Scripture passage as the quote in my previous post “When I am weak I am strong,” (2 Cor 12:10).
Taken separately, these words are profound, taken together; they should remove any vestige of doubt that Paul is a bottom up, not a top-down spirituality guy.
That’s just who he was, or at least who he eventually became, after his lifelong brush with surrender; to the ever present! But mysteriously other worldly, God with skin on Man from Galilee, who they nailed to a tree.
Trying to definitively nail down the central themes in Paul’s letters is no simple task. Not least because several of those letters were not written by him at all. But by later devotees who used his name on their own writing.
The Second Letter to the Corinthians, from which the quotes above come, although widely acknowledged by scholars as authentically written by Paul; is nonetheless, notoriously difficult to interpret.
Why is this so? Well, it turns out that this is not one coherent letter at all. Rather, it is a selection of fragments from several letters that did not survive the ravages of history in their complete form. These little snip bits from various letters were however, eventually cobbled together by some scribe or other and ultimately presented in Christian Scripture as if they were one letter.
All the old power paradigms are turned on their head.
Add to this complexity the likelihood, according to Pauline scholars, that these later scribes couldn’t resist adding a few of their own redactions into the mix, and you end up with a very complex picture indeed.
So complex in fact, that scholars as they are wont to do; are still busy arguing about where one section ends and another begins, how many original letters are represented, and where and if redactions have been inserted, etc.
What can be asserted however from the quotes above is that they are consistent with Paul’s constant refrain that there is a new power in the air! And all the old power paradigms, the jaded conventional wisdom, is now turned on its head, in the wacky out there, inside out, upside down, ‘realm of the living Spirit.’
For Paul the Galilean is the new kid in town and consequently a revolution of Grace-sufficiency (2 Cor 12:9), is about to ensue (more about all that in my next post).