Paul's Conversion and His Worldview

Last class we zeroed in on Paul's encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus and pondered what that event meant for Paul and his worldview. Thinking that he was doing God's will by persecuting his Jewish co-nationals for following Christ, Paul finds out from Jesus that he is actually working against God. How this plays out for Paul will take several years of pondering, thinking, building relationships with other believers and finding out exactly what it is that God now wants him to do in light of this revelation.

In class we determined the following changes to Paul's worldview in light of this revelation that he receives from Jesus:

• Jesus communicates to Paul that people are connected to God and when you hurt people you are essentially hurting God in the process.


• All people matter to God. Paul will work this through over time as he allows Jesus' revelation to penetrate into all that he knew about God up to this point.


• We will find in Paul's letters a focus on Jesus' Resurrection as a pivotal event in history that marks the coming of the future - God's Kingdom - evidenced in Jesus' rising from the dead. This will cause Paul to expand his Jewish eschatology to make sense of the resurrection now happening in the present in the person of Jesus. What this means in regard to what God will restore will be seen in more detail as we start into Paul's letters. At this point we can affirm that Paul's Jewish view of the End is now expanding to Paul's view of the End in light of Jesus' appearance [His life, death, resurrection and ascension]

This coming week we will finish up the section on Paul's theology [thoughts on God] in preparation for getting into the letters. The first letter we are going to tackle is Ephesians. In preparation for this please do the readings on Ephesians outlined in the course syllabus. I start with Ephesians because it is a letter that offers to us Paul's big picture of his view concerning what God's plan is and how it plays itself out in history.

If you were Paul and you had a chance to write a letter that would address every believer in Asia Minor and throughout all the churches that he had relationship with, what would you write? Maybe a good place to start is to think about what you would write if you had an opportunity to address everyone that you knew or had relationship with? What would be your focus? What would you feel important to share with them?

Those who want to dig deeper:

As I promised to you last week, I have linked notes to the section on "Paul and His Recent Interpreters" as a resource for those of you who want to know a bit more about where scholarship has taken Pauline studies in the last 50 years. As I mentioned in class, there has been a very decisive shift from viewing Paul as primarily a Greek thinking individual to now more concentration on realizing that Paul was primarily Jewish in his thinking living in a Hellenized Roman culture.