Discussions of Paul usually focus mostly on the objective content of his faith, what-he-believes about God, sin, and salvation through Jesus. But these ideas were originally the content of Paul’s intensely emotional preaching, by which he hoped to bring about an internal transformation in his audience. His success in doing this, and the particular kind of impact he had on his audience, was dependent on a particular mindset in this audience, a mindset prepared by previous cultural background and previous religious formation, in such a way that the themes of his preaching would have this particular effect on them.
This is no longer true of a great many individuals in the modern world. Many will make no connection at all between the objective content of Pauline beliefs and any admirable subjective feelings and inner transformation he wanted to bring about. Others, if exposed only to the objective content of his preaching, will immediately associate these ideas with meanings the ideas have taken on in a modern church context, often quite different from the meanings that they had for Paul’s original audience. For many people Paul’s language stirs very negative reactions.
For these reasons, I will introduce this study of Pauline Christianity by first sketching a particular cluster of “virtues” — fundamental attitudes, motives, habitual priorities for concern — that I think were the ideal results of the inner transformation Paul wanted to bring about in his audience. I will first describe this subjective side of Pauline spirituality in a way that does not involve the objective content of Pauline preaching, then later explain how I derived these descriptions from the study of the objective content of Paul’s Letter to the Romans, and some of his own suggestions about the inner attitudes of his ideal Christian.
Finding one’s calling.
Finding your calling in life is a matter of matching your own best inner impulses with the external demands and opportunities presented by your social situation. It means finding something important to do with your life, that is energizing because it feels important.
Every society has certain problems that it is important to address, certain tasks that it is important to perform — problems of physical and mental health, problems of justice and injustice, economic problems, problems of human suffering, crime-related problems, problems related to the right future direction, family problems and problems of parenting and child-rearing, and so on. Any given individual generally finds herself in a good position to address some particular problems and not others.
Also because of differences in psychological makeup, some individuals find themselves drawn to certain important tasks and not to others. I might think intellectually that some task is important, but in taking it on I find myself regarding it as a duty, and wake up every morning thinking I have to push myself to do take on tasks that I don’t really want to. In the best case, a person who has found her calling wakes up in the morning energized by the thought of the work ahead of her in the day, fueled by an inner enthusiasm for “making a difference.”
Finding one’s calling makes a person admirable in a particular way. Doing this well requires developing certain internal attitudes and skills — a sensitivity to what is and is not deeply energizing, careful thought about the most important needs of the social situation one is in, alertness to opportunities, ambition to excel, and so on.
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An appendix below gives a good personal account of a woman who felt she had found her calling.
Making rightness a priority for one’s attention and concern.
A “virtue” can be defined as an habitual way of prioritizing one’s concerns. One virtue characteristic of Pauline Spirituality consists in the habit of making rightness a primary concern in each situation one is faced with — in contrast, for example, to approaching each situation thinking, “How can I personally benefit most from the opportunities offered by this situation?”
Neither Paul nor Plato think that rightness is something that can be defined in terms of rules for what to do.
Socratic reasoning shows that all rules for what to do are ambiguous with respect to goodness, since (a) no rule can cover every situation, and (b) a person can always follow rules for bad motivations. For Plato, externally visible behavior always constitutes the “appearances” of virtue, whose “essence” consists in invisible internal habits of mind.
As further essays will point out, Paul associates religion based on rules with Pharisaic Judaism, which he rejects. The ideal many associate with Christian religion today, following a rigid set of rules for behavior (usually referred to as “the Ten Commandments”), is thus much more like Pharisaic Judaism than it is like Pauline Christianity. Paul defines what it means to “follow Jesus” by contrasting this with rule-based religion. The virtue consisting of an habitual, internal, passionate concern for rightness is central to Pauline spirituality.
It is indeed often difficult to know what is the right thing to do in every situation. Some situations are inherently complex and problematic. Making “passionate concern for rightness” a central part of one’s personality would not eliminate this problem. At its very best, the virtue of “concern for rightness” would lead a person to try to understand the complexity of situations facing her, in order to do her best to try to figure out what is the most right thing to do in such situations. This would be part of her habitual and spontaneous response to complex situations.
It is sometimes hard to know what the right behavioral response is to a given situation. It is not so hard to know the difference between being a person who simply does not care about rightness, and a person whose character is such that her spontaneous response to every situation is to try to figure out and do what is the most right thing to do in that situation.
Think about what it would mean to cultivate such an habitual concern for rightness, making it part of one’s personality. What are the opposite habits of mind a person would have to overcome to be a person of integrity and cultivate the habit of spontaneously making concern for rightness a priority in each situation.
One would have to overcome the tendency to give in to social pressure to compromise, pressure to debase oneself and losing self-respect and integrity in order to please others or fit in.
Overcoming the tendency to allow concern for personal gain and advantage take priority over treating others fairly.
Making personal integrity and a concern for rightness central to ones identity, the main basis for one’s self-esteem, rather than tangible signs of success in the social world.
Resisting the tendency to let social status, in-group loyalties, and irrelevant personal biases govern one’s attitude toward others. Cultivating the habit of treating all individuals equally and fairly.
Not letting personal bias skew one’s sense of what concerns deserve to take priority in any given situation. Cultivating the habit of looking at every situation from the point of view of a third person with no personal stake in the situation.
A habitual attitude of “concern for rightness” is the opposite of an habitual attitude which approaches others thinking how one can manipulate them to take advantage of them; basing one’s attitude toward others on self-interest or considerations of social status (feeling entitled to treat “losers” badly); being hypersensitive to personal slights, letting emotional responses to threat or insult lead one to start thinking of how to retaliate by physical or verbal abuse of others; the habit of relying on superior power or violence to get one’s way; the habit of abusing positions of power and authority for self-interest; the habit of disregarding other’s right to their own property, feeling entitled to take the property of others; feeling entitled to special privileges based on inherited wealth or social status; feeling entitled to gain unfair advantages for oneself by cheating in competitions; the habit of letting concern to make a good impression on others take priority over honest self-presentation; the habit of letting petty concerns take priority over more important issues.
Cultivating the most admirable kind of concern for rightness requires avoiding some common ways in which this can go wrong (“counterexamples” to the virtue of concern for rightness).
Avoiding rigidity. Paying careful attention to what each situation calls for, rather than rigidly following a set of rules mistakenly thought to cover all situations.
Avoiding simplistic assessment of situations. Concern for rightness at its best involves habits and skills related to examining the complexity of each situation before making judgments.
Avoiding self-righteousness. At its best, a concern for rightness should not lead a person to identify rightness with her own person or the concrete group she belongs to, treating all criticisms by others as offenses against rightness itself.
As in the case of every virtue, it is important to think of these “counterexamples,” but treat them as a way of refining one’s concept of rightness, rather than a reason for rejecting this virtue entirely.
Being a selfless embodiment of a higher rightness in a world that is not very right, as a means to self-fulfillment, not a restrictive duty.
“Rightness” is both a personal characteristic, being a fair-minded and right-minded person, and also a possible characteristic of a society. Biblical notions of rightness center around the idea that everyone should get what they deserve. It is “not right” when the good suffer and the bad succeed.
Rightness in this sense almost never prevail in actual societies. Rightness in a society would be a situation where power, influence, prestige, and influence are directly proportional to deserving. People enjoying the most recognition, the highest status, and exercising the most influence (politicians, the media, “stars” that everyone recognizes), would be the people who most deserve it. Individuals who are “nobodies,” or looked down on as “losers” would only be people who deserved this. The forces that prevail in society — who exercises power, who gets ahead, what it takes to succeed — would be deserving of respect.
It is probably fairly obvious to most people that most societies fall very short of this ideal of social rightness. But there is a great deal of pressure to accept whatever other people seem to accept, and also therefore to let this determine one’s own ambitions, to evaluate oneself by the standards by which everyone else measures “success.” Even individuals who feel disillusioned because of society’s unrightness are tempted to just become cynical — if rightness does not really prevail in society, why should I make any personal sacrifices to obey the rules. But this means to give up any concern for personal integrity, and let oneself sink to the low level of rightness that prevails in society.
Central to Pauline spirituality is the ideal of becoming a representative of higher rightness in a society in which rightness does not prevail. This means realistically facing the unrightness that prevails (becoming “disillusioned” in this sense), but this is the opposite giving in to cynicism. Rather than becoming cynical, it means developing a refined sensitivity to rightness, trying to respond in the most right way to each individual situation, as well as actively promoting rightness in the world, devoting oneself where possible to righting some of the wrongs of the world. This means adopting a certain identity and self-image, adopting an image of oneself as a representative of rightness in a world that is not right, and taking this image as a standard for self-evaluation.
This amounts to an entirely different attitude toward “morality.” Ordinarily today, people think of moral rules as something imposed by society, restricting the freedom of individuals for the sake of social order. In this context, “doing the right thing” means passive conformity to a set of social rules. And in this context, many people in modern societies prefer to reduce moral rules to the minimum necessary for social order. (“Do whatever you want as long as you don’t hurt anyone,” a principle J. S. Mill [1806-1873] argued for in his influential essay “On Liberty,” has come to seem commonsense to many Americans.)
What is being described here is an entirely different attitude. Concern for rightness means developing and attending to one’s own inner sense of rightness, often in opposition to what prevails in society. It means not regarding this as passive conformity to rules limiting one’s freedom, but as an active and creative means of self-fulfillment, making one’s life mean something. This is not the only way of leading a meaningful life, but it is the way characteristic of this kind of spirituality.
The clearest examples to think about here are figures dedicating their lives to some particular cause, trying to right some particular wrongs — Mahatma Ghandhi righting the wrongs of British colonial imperialism in India, M. L. King righting the wrongs of racial injustice in the US, others devoted to causes such as ecology, women’s rights, stopping child prostitution, and so on. “Doing the right thing” in these cases is not a matter of passive conformity to restrictions on personal freedom. It is rather a matter of actively wanting to “make a difference” in the world by making the world “more right” than it would otherwise be. Rather than being a negative restriction imposed by society from outside, adopting the role of a agent of rightness in an unright world means following one’s own internal passion for rightness in opposition to the forces and conditions that prevail in society. One can see that this taking on this role requires a high degree of self-confidence and often of courage in going up against social forces much stronger than oneself.
Concrete examples like Ghandhi and M. L. King make it easier to grasp why some people would be attracted to this way of being. Concrete examples, especially when they examples of famous people who eventually received a great deal of recognition and admiration, most easily arouse our admiration. But from a Platonist view, there are a number of problems that can arise from taking such concrete figures as role models. The only way to avoid such problems is to focus on internal invisible virtues rather than attention-getting external conduct, and to formulate for oneself abstract concepts of what these virtues would be at their most perfect.
For example, people dedicated to some particular cause tend to simplistically make this cause the single issue for judging all circumstances and all people. A concern for rightness is more perfect the more one develops the inner ability to understand the complex factors involved in a wide range of particular circumstances, to understand and accept that there are a wide variety of ways of leading an admirable life, and develops the habit of making judgments of rightness based on these kinds of understandings.
People dedicated to some “large” cause of social justice are tempted to let this become a justification for treating particular individuals unfairly in “smaller” everyday interactions. “The ends justify the means” — achieving some larger goal justifies treating other innocent people harshly and unfairly, ruining their public reputation, or even doing them physical harm, if one feels this is necessary to further the larger cause. (Stalinist Marxism comes to mind as an extreme example here.) It also seems more attractive to promote some dramatic change in society, in dramatic opposition to others on the “wrong” side of some issue, than it is to concern oneself with doing the most right thing in everyday personal interactions with other individuals. The ideal of “being a selfless representative of rightness in an unright world” becomes more perfect the more it becomes a generalized concern for rightness, extending to the less spectacular and visible arena of everyday personal interactions.
In its more perfect forms, this ideal requires a good deal of self-criticism and willingness for self-sacrifice. Representing rightness by following one’s own inner sense of rightness requires serious efforts to refine one’s moral sensitivity so that it becomes a more reliable basis for moral judgments — more reliable than ordinary rules of society. One of the most important ways of doing this is introspective self-criticism, becoming aware of and internally combating the ways that self-interest can easily masquerade as a concern for rightness — in which case a person becomes “self-righteous.” In other words, a concern for rightness should not be directed entirely outward, struggling against the unrightness of society, but should also be directed inward, to make oneself a more pure vehicle for rightness. This also requires a willingness for self-sacrifice, sacrificing one’s own interest if need be, for the sake of representing rightness. In the most ideal case, a representative of rightness regards her bodily being and public persona as only a vehicle for the cause of rightness, not important in itself. Concern for one’s bodily well being and public reputation and status should take second place to a concern for rightness.
Appendix on “Finding One’s Calling”
The following excerpt from a British woman’s letter is a good concrete example of what it might mean to “find one’s calling.” It shows a woman who feels some extremely demanding work as exhilarating rather than a grudging duty. It was written as an appreciative response to a book by a British Anglican Bishop, Honest to God,popularizing the thought of some modern liberal Christian theologians, criticizing the idea of a God completely external to people (a God “out there”). It also shows how some individuals naturally connect “finding their calling” to a feeling of God’s presence guiding and supporting them.
[One period of separation from her husband because of his job] coincided with the [1956] Hungarian Revolution. I was in England: I speak German and French, and I had a car. So I went to Austria to see what I could do…. At first I floundered about in the mud on the border and in a big reception camp, and after the Christmas holidays in England I went back to take charge of a camp for refugee students, men and girls from 16 to 25 – about 50 of them. Ninety per cent had been fighting, all were in a highly nervous state. They quarreled, they drank too much, they engaged in violent love affairs, they fell ill. I would have thought that I would be no good at all at the job of looking after them — no self-confidence, rather nervous, easily hurt, not very brave.
But I couldn’t put a foot wrong. All the time I had the feeling I was being helped to do and say the right thing. I loved them all so much I hadn’t time to be hurt in my feelings', or to wonder if they loved me, or to be afraid of driving on icy roads, giving them hell if they misbehaved, arguing their cases with Austrian officials. All the time it seemed that God was there, and in a way this bothered me, because I have never believed in a god who can, so to speak, tell me, from without’ or beyond' what to do... This was the first of such experiences: it gave me confidence and courage, and increased my capacity to love... [Later] I was asked to take charge of the adult literacy programme in a 700-bed government hospital in Africa. I had to learn the language properly, find helpers, organize a rota and transport, and spend every afternoon from 1:30-4 at the hospital. Most helpers could give only one afternoon a week, some only one a fortnight: whatever they couldn't do I tried to do. We worked mostly in the surgical wards and during the hottest time of the day. It was extremely tiring, and often the wards smelled awful. But I found myself going as though to a party and coming away as exhilarated as if I'd had a good stiff drink. I've never met such wonderful people: patient, enduring, cheerful, eager to learn, and incredibly brave. Their love was an honour and a benediction, and again I felt I walked with God, even though I rejected the image of somebody up there’ putting out a hand to me.
