The Apostle Paul: His Career and Theology

By Edwin Walhout

A short survey of his career and theology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Edwin Walhout
• Release date: Feb 26, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458091550

Edwin Walhout

I am a retired minister of the Christian Reformed Church, living in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Being retired from professional life, I am now free to explore theology without the constraints of ecclesiastical loyalties. You will be challenged by the ebooks I am supplying on Smashwords.

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THE APOSTLE PAUL

His Career and Theology

by Edwin Walhout

Published by Edwin Walhout

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2010 Edwin Walhout

Cover design by Amy Cole ([e-mail])

See Smashwords.com for additional titles by this author,

including a concise commentary on the book of Romans.

(type Walhout in the search box).

Biblical quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

1 OVERVIEW

2 PAUL’S EARLY LIFE

3 PAUL’S CONVERSION

4 PAUL’S GOSPEL

5 GESTATION PERIOD

6 CALL TO ANTIOCH

7 CYPRUS

8 PERGA

9 ANTIOCH OF PISIDIA

10 ICONIUM

11 LYSTRA

12 CONFERENCE IN JERUSALEM

13 LETTER TO THE GALATIANS

14 SECOND MISSIONARY JOURNEY

15 PHILIPPI

16 THESSALONICA

17 BEREA

18 ATHENS

19 CORINTH

20 A LETTER TO THESSALONICA

21 A SECOND LETTER TO THESSALONICA

22 THIRD MISSIONARY JOURNEY

23 THE CORINTHIAN CORRESPONDENCE

24 THE LETTER TO THE CHURCH IN ROME

25 ARREST IN JERUSALEM

26 ROME

27 A LETTER TO PHILIPPI

28 A LETTER TO PHILEMON

29 A LETTER TO THE CHURCH IN COLOSSAE

30 THE LETTER CALLED EPHESIANS

31 PAUL’S LATER LIFE

32 A LETTER TO TIMOTHY

33 A LETTER TO TITUS

34 A FINAL LETTER TO TIMOTHY

35 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO PAUL: SUMMATION

1. OVERVIEW

Paul was raised in a strict Pharisaic home in Tarsus, a prominent city on the southern coast of what is now Turkey. As such he acquired the unique understanding of God that is the essential part of the Jewish heritage. That understanding involved at least two major parts: a) God as the sovereign creator and lord of the entire universe, and b) God as the giver of the covenantal law, the Torah, to the people of Israel. As a converted Jew Paul built upon that foundation and shows how God now sends his Son Jesus as the Jewish messiah to be the savior of the whole world, Gentiles as well as Jews.

Having been raised in a Jewish home in the middle of the pagan Greek world, Paul learned early how to relate to people of non-Jewish background, people who were foreign to the unique religious traditions of Judaism. This early childhood experience was excellent preparation for his later forays into that pagan world with the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. He was confident, not afraid to confront the religious and philosophical opinions of that polytheistic world. He did his best to help graft those non-Jewish believers into the tree represented by the Jewish race.

But his conversion while on a dastardly errand to Damascus altered much of Paul’s early Pharisaic outlook on life, putting into divine perspective all the religious opinions he had inherited as well as the recent disturbing things he himself had experienced in connection with Jesus and the early church. He remained a loyal and practicing Jew all the while he was a Christian apostle, finding that he need not abandon his heritage but only to adjust its parameters to embrace fully the Lord Jesus as the Jewish messiah promised ages before.

Far from writing abstract theological speculation, Paul explained his theology not so much in logical language as in terms of its practical application to the lives and views of those who believed in Jesus. Accordingly, we find his theology embedded not in systematic books of abstract theology but in intensely existential letters of advice and explanation to the struggling churches he founded. It will be important for us to retain that vivid and existential connection to real life conditions when we examine the theological insights of the Apostle Paul. That will mean that we do not rest content to perceive the logic of Paul but also, and more importantly, the difference that theology makes for our total lifestyle, the way we think and live and obey the Lord.

Many of us have some difficulty in getting a picture of the world and of history that moves beyond our own immediate circle of people. We come into the world concerned mainly with ourselves, what to eat and where to live and how to live with others in our family and how to spend our time and money. Self-centered. We slowly grow beyond that and begin to see things in perspective of a larger group, maybe our family’s interests, or our church’s interests, our city, our state, our country.

What Christians come to as they mature is to see life and its concerns in the light of God, not merely of our own human desires and ambitions. We learn to ask, What is God doing? What does God want us to do and to be? We become theists, trying to understand the world and our own times in the light of the larger view of what God, who created it all, wants to have happen.

Paul too learned those things, becoming a Christian and then bringing his unique talents into line with what God is accomplishing in this world through his Son Jesus. He learned to see himself as nothing as compared with the all-important worth of seeing what God was doing through the gospel and the Spirit of Jesus. What happened to him was not important; what the gospel accomplished was.

Paul was a thorough-going theist. That means he understood not only that God created the whole world but also that, having created it, he continues to work in such a way as to achieve his original purpose in bringing human beings into existence. That purpose is to have the entire human race live as his image as it goes about gaining mastery over the earth and its potential.

Theism means to recognize that everything that happens must be understood in connection with God’s purpose.

2. PAUL’S EARLY LIFE UNDER THE TORAH

We know little about the actual conditions of how Paul was brought up in Tarsus. It is reasonable to assume, however, that in his Jewish home he learned how to read