Conversion,apostasy,or hybridity? The terrible,troubled,transformative experience of Paul as exemplar for missiology in an age of multiplicity

The terrible and troubled experience of Paul and the embrace of failure

The lesson that we can take from Paul for mission in an age of hybridity rests fundamentally on reframing Paul’s experience as “terrible and troubled.” Contemporary missional imaginations often idealize the early church movement, setting up a romanticized, untenable picture as the goal of our missional project. Privileging the undisputed Pauline letters as the textual source for the Apostle’s experience and as the context of the development of his unquestionably important theology and ethics for Christian thought enables followers of Jesus to recognize the latent potential of conflict and the spiritual value of failing as catalyst for (rather than threat against) economic, social, and religious transformation. This fundamental reorientation or reemphasis does three things for the argument about the role of tension in establishing new cultural incarnation of faith when setting Paul as missional exemplar.

First, it recognizes rather than shies away from a humanized Paul. Reimagining Paul as he self-presents in his epistles embraces this hero of faith not as eloquent preacher, innovator, and theological genius with the qualifications to boot but as entrepreneurial hermeneut with deep conviction, peculiarities, and difficult traits. It means elevating him not despite but in full view of his struggle, first, to violently enforce normative religious rules and then, to break and theologically redefine them. It means recognizing his desire to preserve the Hebrew story of salvation and its symbolic universe even as he challenges its gatekeepers with new ritual practices and interpretive schema to make it meaningful for a non-Hebrew audience. It means not reading over his passionate but hyperbolic flare, ad hominem attacks, anxiety, overinflated ego, and contradictions. It means celebrating his cultural integration of Gentiles into a Jewish system and persevering the real, raw blowback he suffered for his holy troublemaking. Paul’s missionary journeys in their unfiltered, unromanticized vagaries present a familiar, even an encouraging scriptural analog for prophetic leadership navigating the challenges of hybridity. The infuriating and invigorating strength of Paul’s entrepreneurial personality, his fears and failures, the fragmentation he experienced with James, Peter, Barnabas, and Antioch and then in Galatia and Corinth, show missiologists that the work of integrating and innovating new expressions of faith will include tension. Further, it elucidates the gospel call for establishing new socio-religious lifeforms that eschew the policing practices of parent cultures. Emphasizing the terrible and troubled experience of Paul seeks to frame tension, uncertainty, and innovation as spiritual gifts, not as threats to fidelity, defense for culture wars, or prescriptive codes for fundamentalist or dogmatic interpretation.

Second, emphasizing the Apostle’s difficult journey of leadership enables contemporary missional movements to embrace risk. By making “trouble” normative, this interpretation of Paul as exemplar of hybridity disempowers strategies of control and authoritarianism that seek to mitigate mistakes through conformity and sin-management. As missiologists work to move away from colonial patterns of evangelization and strive to diversify voices that contribute to theological formation, we recognize and repent of the racist and sexist structures of power that have governed Church polity, and we make waves. Further, we make mistakes that have the potential to lead to deeper transformation through greater understanding, authentic repentance, truer humility, and more just practices. But challenging the status quo involves risk. Seeking more complete conversion in ourselves and our societies involves unsettling power. I see this in my role as a professor in both theology and social entrepreneurship, where I teach business and innovation techniques from the leading edge of research in social change. The methods and insights of the strategies vary, but ubiquitously, leading theories and authors in the field champion failure as a key ingredient to the process of transformation.

This leads me to my last reason for reclaiming the terrible and troubled experience of Paul, and it revolves around what Richard Rohr (2011) calls “falling upward.” By demythologizing perfection as the expectation of the holy missional life, this radical reorientation demonstrates how spiritual maturation and new Spirit-led incarnations always involve dying, falling, and changing. This is painful business that can lead to character assassination, painful misunderstanding, community fractures, and heated debates, which we will trace shortly in a brief highlight reel of Paul’s most tense moments in ministry. Rohr’s insights recognize that in formation, humans need to start with stability, assertions about identity that feel secure, and even rules-based teaching. But invitation into life in the Spirit requires movement beyond and sometimes even against these primary forms of spirituality. The inconsistent tone and temper, developing theological nuances, and changing cultural codes of the Apostle offer a paradigm of hybridity that recognizes the integral role of trying, failing, and repenting on the path to spiritual maturity. It also disempowers cheap methods of analysis that equate the “fruit of the Spirit” with adherence to the norm, submission to those in power, and avoidance of rocking the boat. This presentation does not normalize troublemaking in an attempt to relativize ethics or to resist equitable structures of accountability. Rather, the hermeneutical strategies and ethical principles of Paul encourage a moral framework that requires greater responsibility, more complete formation of conscience, and deeper attentiveness to the Spirit accompanied by greater relinquishing of personal rights in favor of the common good.

Conversion reconsidered: Paul’s encounter with the Holy Other as invitation to hybridity

To begin my textual investigation, I posit that the “conversion” trope of previous mission paradigms has often obfuscated the qualitative change and theological consequences of Paul’s revelatory encounter on the Damascus Road. In keeping with the growing body of scholarly literature on the Jewishness of the Apostle, this interpretation insists that Paul did not “convert” from Judaism to some other religion. In other words, he did not exchange his socioreligious community of accountability, renounce his spiritual heritage, or repudiate the symbolic sacred world of his tradition to confess the creed of a new faith. Rather, his personal encounter with Jesus yielded a redefined understanding of his community’s tradition as refracted through the significance of Christ’s death and resurrection. The unexpected appearance of the Holy Other on the Damascus Road altered the terms upon which he established community cohesion, shattering his too-small concept of covenant faithfulness. In the wreckage of his deconstructed religious paradigm, Paul found God’s presence manifesting among Gentiles in their gentileness, not in so much as they adapted to Jewish codes of conduct and prescriptive regulations of holiness governed by his culture. Thus, as Paul made meaning out of his encounter with the Risen Christ, he discovered an invitation to move away from exclusivism into hybridity, which I am defining as a cultural process of ongoing transformations yielded through encounters with difference with the potential for fusions and identity reconstructions that unsettle power structures and patterns of homogeneity. To adequately demonstrate Paul’s falling, failing, and finding of deeper faith, I will organize my textual analysis under two subheadings: Paul before encountering the Risen Christ: A particularist and exclusivist worldview and Paul after encountering the Risen Christ: Paul’s missiology of hybridity. By the end of these two examinations, a hermeneutical strategy will emerge with a robust ethical principle for navigating the controversies engendered by a mission that values unity, celebrates diversity, and cultivates hybridity.

Paul before encountering the Risen Christ: A particularist and exclusivist worldview

The magisterial insight of N.T. Wright (2005) on Paul’s three worlds shows us how the Apostle developed his sense of vocation, ethics, unique communicative style, and theology amid multiplicity. In keeping with Wright, I want to emphasize how the socioreligious and political spheres that shaped the Apostle also presented competing cultural codes, which I do not think very dissimilar from those in our own 21st-century missional and theological terrain. The three worlds of Paul are: (1) Second Temple Judaism; (2) the Roman Empire; and (3) Hellenism.

The context of Paul’s religious training and Pharisaical formation occurred amid Jewish Diaspora in the context of Roman imperialism. As a son of the Tribe of Benjamin, circumcised on the eighth day, Paul boasted of his exemplary Hebrew pedigree. He mentioned his zealousness for tradition and admitted to the accuracy of his infamy as a persecutor of the movement of those calling Jesus Messiah (Phil 3:1–6; Gal 1:13–14). However, he was also Paul of Tarsus, a Greek-speaking urban center in Asia Minor. Thus, Paul’s language, reasoning, philosophical strategies, and rhetorical style evidenced the Stoic schools of thought that influenced his thinking and made him the erudite scholar and persuasive spokesperson that came to lead the non-Hebrew movement of faith. His use of anticipated objections in argumentation, consistent employment of dyads for comparison, regular adoption of Stoic lists of virtues and vices, and presentation of the gospel with an emphasis on inversion, show how he allowed the revelation he received from Christ to take on Hellenistic form in the imperial Roman world.

But he did not draw out his message with repudiation for his ancestral faith. The worldview that shaped his religious framework, the sacred stories, ethical codes, and ritual observances that gave cadence to his life, arose in the time of Second Temple Judaism, or better yet Judaisms. E.P. Sanders (1977, 1992) has shown authoritatively that in antiquity differing groups of Jews interpreted covenant relationship with Yahweh and faithfulness to Torah with competing norms of purity. The Essenes lived ordered, disciplined lives eschewing many common practices such as slavery and cultivating virtues through strict regiments of purity through renunciations, study, and prophecy. Some groups even retreated from imperial society to safeguard their holiness and to observe ritual cleanliness through asceticism, voluntary poverty, daily immersion practices, priestly celibacy, punctilious prayer and eating habits, and scholarship, which likely gave us the Dead Sea Scrolls (Lim, 2021). The Zealots prioritized the covenant promise to the Davidic throne and took up armed resistance to reclaim the divine inheritance to the Promised Land advocating violence against not only Rome but also imperial collaborators from within Judaism (Horsley, 1986). Finally, different sects also existed generally in favorable relationship to imperial power and with varying degrees of authority and influence (Saldarini, 2001). The Pharisees preserved and passed on the Oral Torah and trained in competing rabbinical schools of thought to continue Jewish life beyond Temple cultic worship and especially in Diaspora, whereas the Sadducees utilized their elite economic and social connections not only to administer affairs of the empire but also to maintain and regulate the Temple. Therefore, Paul’s world before the Damascus Road experience existed in a non-monolithic ethic of faithfulness. However, covenantal terms in each sect defined belonging through ethnic exclusivism and cultural particularism (Sanders, 1977, 2009; Dunn, 2008a).

Paul says in Galatians that he had passionately taken up the customs and conventions of his form of Judaism, so much so that he went beyond normative practices to violently defend the particularities of his Pharisaic tradition against those new measures by Jews preaching that the Kingdom of God had come in Jesus and that the resurrection confirmed Jesus’ status as the long-awaited Messiah. In other words, the zealous young Benjaminite saw his school of thought as the protector of Truth and regarded his interpretive community as the cultural plumb line for orthopraxis. He believed that his group exclusively held the key to understanding salvation and rightness with God in heart and in action. Thus, his theological training and religious authority made him and his like-minded allies the gatekeepers of covenant inclusion. They determined who was in and who was out. Their designated behavioral patterns, rites, and cultural markers defined what it looked like to be holy and determined who posed a threat to purity. Further, their spiritual insight and power justified them to neutralize outliers, blasphemers, or threats.

Paul’s pre-Damascus Road spirituality and mission, therefore, came from a place of genuine conviction and wholehearted faithfulness. His spirituality rested on a rigid definition of identity that required cultural homogeneity secured by soteriological narrowness. Removing Paul from these tense religious politics to anachronistically fit his experience into evangelistic categories that move him from unbeliever to believer obfuscates the transformative potential for groups now in positions that determine who fits “in” orthodox Christianity and whose movements meet coded regulations of holiness. We may miss the invitation to hybridity offered in the sacred story of Paul’s encounter with Christ. In meeting the Risen Jesus, he found in the face of his theological opponents a surprising invitation to deeper faith and greater inclusion. Paul immediately began his Spirit-filled reinterpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures, symbols, and rituals which required that he give up his violent dogmatic campaign to convert others to his way of life. He embraced what Rohr calls the spirituality of the second half of life, that is risk-taking openness led by the unwieldy power and mystery of God that leads beyond homogeneity and rules-based teaching to unity in diversity.

Paul after encountering the Risen Christ: Paul’s missiology of hybridity

To fully understand the nuances of how Paul altered his cultural expectations and eschewed exclusionary practices requires an honest assessment of the steps and missteps he took to develop his gospel message. Using the basic plotlines introduced by Wright (2013) in Paul and the Faithfulness of God as a visual map for Paul’s changing convictions toward theological integrity and cultural performances of faithfulness, I will now overlay moments in Paul’s hermeneutical development and spiritual journey to show how Paul moved from cultural defender to theological negotiator and then from inclusivist enforcer back to hybrid reconciler by tracing five major ruptures in his experience. The ruptures will structure the remainder of my argument, and they are: Paul’s encounter with the Holy Other on the Damascus Road, his successful defense of the gospel of uncircumcision at the Jerusalem Council, the conflict over hybrid fellowship around the table during the Antioch Incident, his defense of the gospel of uncircumcision in the Galatian Incident, and finally, his embrace of hybridity during the Corinthian Problem. Figure 1 plots how these various events involved theological and cultural movement for Paul on two axes: particularism–universalism and inclusivism–exclusivism.

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Figure 1.

Paul’s Shifting Theo-Cultural Positions.

I have already examined the encounter with the Holy Other on the Damascus Road. But it is critical to acknowledge that Paul’s move from preservationist of Pharisaic theology and guardian of covenant purity to champion of the very ones he had persecuted likely rendered him apostate to many of his colleagues, friends, and mentors (Segal, 1990). Embracing his doctrinal enemy meant a complete reformulation of his previous understanding of truth and righteousness. The revelation Paul received meant the annunciation of a new kind of kingdom, one that fulfilled the Davidic promise not by political maneuvering to take back geographical space or securing human lineage to a seat of power elevating one ethnic group above the others in the region. The gospel of the uncircumcised broke open the physical manifestation of God’s presence tied to the Temple, proprietarily monitored, and exclusively accessed by the few, namely the marked male bodies with power and purity born into the right kind of family. Jesus’ resurrection catalyzed a revitalized covenant that included Gentiles, not in the periphery of religious life but in the center of God’s missional plan. This iconoclastic rupture of Temple cultic religion meant that the Divine presence now dwelled in all people baptized into Christ, inhabiting many diverse forms and practices, geographical and cultural spaces. Paul calls this the new creation and seeks to articulate how this egalitarian social order includes covenant with God not only for Jews following Torah but also for Gentiles following Jesus through the Spirit in their own unique cultural lifeforms, even as divergent manifestations support one another through unity in peculiarity. But what does this mean? What does it look like? How did Paul navigate a Spirit-led renewal that included Gentiles as Gentiles, not as Jewish coverts?

This, then, leads us to four additional ruptures and their respective cultural conversions or shifts. Figure 2 shows the chronology of these four additional ruptures. These critical moments in the Apostle’s ministry draw attention to how his journey out of exclusivism and cultural elitism into inclusivism and cultural hybridity involved major moments of falling, failing, and changing. A deeper analysis of the events and doctrinal tensions in each of these pivotal junctures in Paul’s spiritual formation and theological development will show Paul’s code-switching and ethical reformulating as he innovated an egalitarian hermeneutic of faithfulness.

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Figure 2.

Paul’s Timeline of Ruptures.

Conclusion

Paul’s embrace of hybridity in response to the conflicts in Corinth meant taking a risk that the Spirit would take up residence in these diverse members with their varied cultural ways and make them holy versions of themselves. His emphasis on holy living, despite the risky business of Spirit-led practice over and against rules-based spirituality, takes center stage in 1 Corinthians. His hybrid hermeneutic does not insinuate any hint of ethical ambivalence or cultural relativism. Instead, Paul methodologically employed the process of code-switching. He sought not to reiterate his own cultural code to train them up or to avoid mistakes, missteps, or misjudgments in their practice of faith. Rather he sought to cultivate their spiritual faculties by rooting them in the foundational narratives and symbols of the Hebrew tradition and then imaginatively connecting them to the contemporary questions of faith in their Corinthian setting. He tied the patriarchs and matriarchs to their story and culture. He recast faithfulness in the light of his audience’s moral dilemmas. He did not reimpose the Law of Judaism onto them. Instead, he related the wisdom of the Hebrew tradition to the values of gnosticism and empowered them with a new interpretive capacity that could navigate the cultural questions of their own debates through the prism of knowledge in Christ and life in the Spirit. He communicated the concepts and metaphors of faith using cultural models particular to Corinthian thought, grammatically integrating important gnostic terms, fleshing out how it might look in practice using Stoic lists of virtues and vices. Sometimes he offered advice or posited a new directive. Certainly, he did this as the community’s founder, offering them the council of a father in the faith and leveraging the role he played in the community with all the authority offered therein. However, he also recognized (even as he resisted) their autonomy to reject his teaching (as they did at the start of 2 Corinthians) or accept it (as they seem to have done by the conclusion of the chronology traced in the sixth letter fragment found in 2 Corinthians). Therefore, the spiritual wisdom and mature faith of Paul’s hybrid, egalitarian community emerged through a similar process of conflict, tension, theological debate, and cultural jockeying.

The ethic that emerges in the Pauline text as an antidote to cultural homogeneity and theological exclusivism is love that builds up with the deepest goodwill and respect for the other. At the end of Paul’s journey through conflict, beyond mistaken overstatements of his own theological position, and over painful relational fractures into authentic community, cultivating love that respects cultural differences and celebrates unity in peculiarity ultimately took missional priority. Love rather than conformity or singularity acted as the determining criterion for Paul as he trained his communities to navigate liberty, rights, boundaries, and responsibilities. Covenant with God and with a diverse family of faith requires conscious, ongoing examination of how terms, practices, and processes consciously build up other parties in the relationship, even when that means trusting the Spirit by accepting troubling differences or by troublemaking. In Paul’s own practice, that meant sometimes bearing with those that injured him, sometimes splitting off to go in a different direction, sometimes giving up freedoms, sometimes holding a theological line, sometimes repenting, and sometimes stirring up conflict. The rich example of Paul’s missional life normalizes the painful processes of accepting others in the Body without requirement for their compliance to one’s own norms even as it unveils the surprising way that God’s presence manifests in unlikely places, positions, and forms. So, how can terrible and troubled mission be transformative for the glory of God? By radically reorienting our notion of holiness away from homogeneity, the ecclesial community of the new creation celebrates difference even as it negotiates Spirit-led life together with the wild, wonderful, unwieldy risk and reward of fellowship by faith in Christ through love.