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| The Apostle Paul, by Rembrandt |
You were Paul of Tarsus even when still
Saul,
a Hebrew born of Hebrews in an alien
land,
fiercely zealous for the Law and traditions of
elders,
a man considered “blameless” by yourself, no
doubt,
until you were fiercely arrested by the fraudulent
Christ.
According to Nietzsche, dear friend, you are the
fraud,
the lying deceiver who gave birth to
Christianity,
that most pathetic, womanish religion known to
man—
you, filled with spite and overcome by a psychotic
hallucination
self-convinced of your self-created
self-deception.
And then I hear a more convincing song by
Schütz,
“Saul, Saul, was vervolgst du
mich”—
communicating the shattering of your
consciousness,
not by a self-generated hallucination or
wish,
but by God-in-Christ ripping you open
wide.
Never again were you Paul alone, just
you—
“For now I live, not I, but Christ lives in
me”—
no mere religious belief, no formulaic
faith,
but the living experience of a man raised
up
from death-in-self to life enlivened by the risen
Christ.
Your words, you know, are dynamite,
and ever will be in domesticated
Christianity,
in these churches “that are tombs and sepulchers of
God”—
for you are the voice of the experience of God in
Christ,
as surely as Plato voices the God of the Beautiful
and Good.
“For now we see through a glass,
darkly,
but then face to face.
Though outwardly we waste away,
inwardly we are being renewed from glory to
glory
until God is all in all.”
