Meeting God in Paul by Rowan Williams

Author:Rowan Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SPCK

3

The new creation: Paul’s Christian universe

Their unbelieving minds are so blinded by the God of this passing age, that the gospel of the glory of Christ who is the image of God cannot dawn upon them and bring them light. (2 Corinthians 4.4)

The image of God in Jesus

Let’s begin with that deceptively simple phrase ‘the image of God’ – because in trying to understand how, for Paul, the whole universe is reorganized around the figure of Jesus, this idea is central. But it is essential to remember how very strange such a phrase would have been when first uttered. As noted in our first chapter, Paul is roughly the same age as Jesus, perhaps a few years younger; and twenty or so years after Jesus’ execution, Paul is saying that this person, his contemporary, somebody who was well known to people that Paul knew well, is the image of God – that in him, as he just as startlingly puts it in 1 Corinthians 1.24, is the power and wisdom of God; or that – as he says in 2 Corinthians 4.4–6 – in his face shines the glory of God, what the Jews called the shekhinah, the blinding radiance of God’s presence. In Hebrew Scripture, this presence is described as radiating so powerfully that it throws people to the ground; it’s like a dense fog of light which you can’t breathe in and you can’t stand in (1 Kings 8.10–11, where the glory comes down on the newly consecrated Temple in Jerusalem and the priests cannot stay on their feet to do their work).

And that glory, that stifling intensity of presence in holy places, is what you see and sense if you look at Jesus, so Paul claims: a strong claim, to put it mildly. Imagine for a moment what a leap of imagination would be involved in thinking of someone of your own generation and background in terms like that.

So in this chapter what I hope to do is to unpick a little of the process by which Paul comes to that kind of conclusion, and the ways in which he works it out so as to make it a shaping, a dictating element for human life. And as I hinted in the previous chapter, part of the answer to that question can be found in the character of Paul’s conversion as he and others tell us about it. On the road to Damascus – where he is about to arrest members of the Christian group and take them back for punishment, perhaps even lynching, in Jerusalem – he is surrounded and overtaken by ‘glory’, surrounded by choking, blinding light, so intense that it knocks him off his horse. He can’t see because of the intensity of the light; he is literally blinded for a few days. And from the heart of this blinding, stifling, overwhelming radiance a voice speaks and a human face emerges: the face of the Galilean rebel executed in humiliating circumstances some two or three years earlier, to the satisfaction of Paul’s priestly patrons.

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