Paul the Sower

Now let us examine more closely what we mean when we say that Paul's religion was a religion of experience. Any truth, including religious truth, must be known in one of three ways: on authority, by rational deduction, or through experience. Take a homely illustration: "John Doe is a kind man." Everybody tells us this and we believe it—until we see him kick a dog. Then authority goes to the winds. The "truth" was after all not really a part of us. It was a truth on authority. Or we observe John Doe and from his actions we conclude that he is kind. This will stand against authority. If any one tells us the contrary we disbelieve him. But if we put a proposition of real life up to John Doe and he fails, proves to be hard-hearted, then our previous belief vanishes. We conclude that what we had previously observed was only a veneer. But if on the other hand we have tried John Doe, have experienced his unfailing reaction and response to our every need, then our faith in him, being experiential, is a part of us and cannot be destroyed whatever we hear or whatever we see. We know John Doe, and stick to him against all appearances.

It is the same with our religious beliefs. We hear of God from our fathers and we believe. But we get out into life and we find or think we find that what we have been taught is not in accord with actual facts as we encounter them, and the religion of authority falls from us. It was no part of us. We then build up a religious philosophy of our own. This goes very well in fair weather. But when adversity comes our carefully erected philosophy crashes down before the blasts of experience. But when we have once actually experienced the love of God, that is a part of our being. Neither death nor life, nor things present nor things to come, nor super-planetary sovereignties, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, can separate us from it. Of course, in this sense the love of God is not a sentiment or an emotion, but a substance or a force, if we wish to distinguish between a substance and a force. It is the dynamic manifestation of God's creative power which is at the basis of all existence. We conceive it as love because it makes possible the fulfilment of our being. This religion of experience is the only real religion. A truth is never really known until it is actualized in experience, and in the same way the religious life is simply "bearing witness" to what has been experienced.

This was the religion of Paul, a religion of being-experience. It was not derived from the authority of the Apostles. In fact in the case of Paul all authority was on the side of the old Jewish religion. That was the religion of authority, which he discarded. Nor was Paul's religion based upon reason or logic. Reasoning had no effect upon him. We may be sure that before he was converted and while he was still persecuting, he had looked into the situation very carefully and knew all the facts about the Christian religion that he ever knew. It was experience alone that changed him.

What this life experience was is shown very clearly by Paul's letters. In fact, in a general way it is the only subject of his letters, as I have already said. But let us be more explicit. Of course the vision on the road to Damascus was the turning point, but it must be remembered that it was only a turning point, not the experience itself. What did the change then initiated mean to Paul? Paul was brought up under the law. But this does not mean that he was a formalist. As to the law he was blameless, he says,—which means in the technicalities of the law. But this could not satisfy a nature like Paul's. He had the great concept of righteousness in the larger sense, the principle behind the law. This, by the way, was the Hebrew contribution to religious ideas. To the primitive notion of the law as such, governed by fear, the Jew added the sense of a duty owed to the principle of rightness. Jesus showed that the essence of this underlying principle was love. And so we have the completed triangle,—the law, righteousness underlying the law, love as the basis of the principle of righteousness. Eventually Paul's concept embraced all these things. Righteousness found its ultimate sanction not in fear nor in duty but in man's recognition of his normal function, by the exercise of which alone the individual can find satisfaction and fulfilment.

His position under the law Paul paints for us very vividly in the seventh chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, which must be understood autobiographically and not rhetorically. "Miserable man that I am, who shall deliver me from this body of death?", is a very real cry of anguish. What was this body of death? Paul explains: "For once I was alive independent of the law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang into life and i died. The commandment designed to bring me life brought me death." This is not very clear to us. It does not seem very real, and in fact it bears traces of Paul's Hebrew conditioning. The Rabbis had a theory that until the age of nine a child was innocent of sin; at that time the evil instinct came in, and the law to point the right way. This is what Paul refers to, and if it does not seem real to us we must remember that it was very real to the original recipients of Paul's letter. In any event there is no mistaking the reality of the experience as set forth in the rest of the chapter. "I do not know what I am doing. I do not what I will but what I loath. The wish to do right is in my lower nature, but not the power. What I do is not the good deed I desire, but the evil deed I do not desire. But if I do what I do not desire, it is not the real I acting. I discover in my natural faculties a law at variance with the law of my real self. I am simply the slave of my natural faculties." This was the state in which Paul found himself and this is what led him to exclaim, "Miserable man that I am!"