Meeting the St. Paul You Never Knew. Webcast (1)

Notes from the Webcast February 25, 2014 (1)

(First 30 min. Josefina Fernandez.
Please continue on Gretchen Tucker notes  for the second part of the webcast)

 Fr. Rhor is presenting a Core of ideas about the worldview that St. Paul tries to clarify.
-Paul is the outsider that takes the inside. He is a critic of the religion of Judaism and the new religion of Christianity.
– He is the founder of the Church: Jesus proclaims the reign of God and he comes with a vehicle to communicate this message.
– He talks more about the Christ.
– He took the courage to take the Roman Empire in his quest.
– All his experience started on Damascus where he meets Christ and no Jesus. He meets this Great Spirit on the world and it is the same kind experience we have.
– He writes letters as a way of pastoral teaching and his way is very dialectic. He makes very strong contrast trying to bring higher synthesis. He is leading to a new awareness that he calls the Mystery of Christ.
– He was not one the 12 disciples.
– He did not know Jesus on the flesh.
– He is a Jew that rejected his own traditions in many ways. Jews are monotheist and Paul was talking on his teachings of God the Father, God the Holy Spirit and Jesus as the son of God. He was very comfortable talking with this vocabulary. It took 3 centuries to understand that Paul was talking about the Holy Trinity.
-Where does Paul’s get this authority? He gets it from the encounter of this new kind of God.
– He did not reject Judaism by the contrary he concentrated and went to preach at the synagogues. After 10 years of rejection he started thinking that this message is not for Judaism and it is for everybody.
 
 Universal messages for everybody. He presents a cosmic Christ: Christ is the pre-existing blueprint (Colossian and Ephesians letters). He is the one that identify Christ with humanity at its lowest level, most humiliating state and what he calls the mystery of the cross. Then he states that Christ is the final goal of history and it is what he calls the image of the risen Christ. So Christ is the one that pulls all the meaning of reality together. When Paul talks about Christ he is talking about everything. He is talking about that Christ is the pattern of the universe. We did not understand Paul in this mystical way.

Much later, we put Christ as (privatized) a private ownership and control.

This much-devolved notion of salvation is totally individualistic.

Paul is not an individualistic thinker. He is a cosmic mystical thinker. If you do not have this frame you will misinterpret what he says.

Paul keys phrase by which you can tell that he is talking about this mystical template by which all reality is explained is “In Christ “ .

Paul is a Greek speaking Jew who come from outside Israel . He is from Tarso (Turkey). He did not grow up on the Jewish ghetto so he does not have a ghetto mentality. He is a cosmopolitan person so he decided that his message belongs to all people. When the Jewish people took him in arrest he told them that he was a roman citizen so he had to be judge by roman tribunal.

He wrote most of his letters in Greek and that was the language of the elite at that time. He knew some Hebrew and Aramaic but was not his primary languages.

Paul gives shape and structure to Jesus message.

Jesus is the great proclaimer of the mystery. Jesus did not found the church, as we know it. He was just proclaiming the mysteries at higher level and Paul try to bring them to a practical pastoral level where they can happen. We know now that Paul’s communities in Corinth, Philippians, Ephesus, were not more than 40 to 45 people.

In these pagan communities that were decadent, Paul’s wanted to create small living schools. When these groups started having problems he wrote to them moralistic letters so they did no came a part and be discredit by bad behaviors these groups of people were very important for the transmission of the message and Jesus will not be trusted. When we read his letters, we think that he is talking at a moralistic level.

His letters in general were not moralistic. His concern is you to the picture of the Christ Mystery: God identification with history and humanity at its lowest most humiliating suffering level and that is what Paul’s means with Folly of the Cross or the Mystery of the Cross . So he creates the mystical foundation for Christianity. The other place we found this is in John Gospel.  And it is a Mystery. It is not something that you achieve by performance; it is something that you are already participating in it and you do not know it. And that is true today. This is what is going on.  This is what is happening. This Christ consciousness, this Trinitarian flows of life and love that we all are already flowing in. His job was to tell you that this is already the truth. It is not a new truth. It has been always been truth but we are a living in a time that we can talk about it. We can give words. We can give significance.

Another idea presented in Paul that we are unable to develop in this short lecture is the that he takes the Jesus notion of the reign of God, the kingdom of God, the big picture and he really politicized

Please continue on Gretchen Tucker notes  for the second part of the webcast)

Josefina Fernandez

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