my own small lifetime—toward nonviolence, inclusivity, mysticism, and ever
more selfless love, as well as more correct naming of the shadow side of things.
This is the gradual “second coming of Christ.” Our present highly partisan
politics, angry culture wars, and circling of the wagons around white privilege
are just the final gasps of the old, dying paradigm. Jesus and Paul believed this
already two thousand years ago, and we are now seeing the inevitable results at
an increased pace. Violence is at the lowest rate in all of history, the statisticians
say. (What must it have been like before?)
For Paul, it is all a “game of thrones,” and there is only one legitimate throne
that keeps the smaller kingdoms in perspective and finally losing. “Jesus is Lord”
is likely our first simple creed and acclamation (1 Corinthians 12:3), negating
the imperial Roman “Caesar is Lord.” That is Paul’s great and firm act of faith.
These smaller entities have a life and death of their own, and can never be
captured by either killing or “redeeming” one individual. Evil was seen by both
Jesus and Paul as corporate bondage and illusion, more than just private
perverse behavior. Of course, both are true in the full picture.
Very important, and an utterly new idea from Paul was that the Gospel was
not about following some criteria outside of the human person—which he calls
“the law,” but that the locus of authority had changed to inside the human
person. This is why he rails against law so strongly and surprisingly in both
Romans and Galatians. The real and “new” law is an actual participation with
Someone inside of us: the “love of God that has been poured into our hearts by
the Holy Spirit” (Romans 5:5 and throughout). This Inner Authority, this
personal moral compass, will guide us more than any outer pressure or law, he
believes, and it is available to everyone. This is revolutionary and admittedly
scary. As Paul writes in Romans 2:14–15, even “the pagans...can point to the
substance of the law that is already written on their hearts...they can
demonstrate the effect of the Law...to which their own conscience bears
witness.” Paul thus provides the headwaters of our still largely undeveloped
theology of natural law and individual conscience. He is directly building on
what Jeremiah had foretold as the “new covenant” (31:31–34), which would be
“written on our hearts.” It makes one wonder if most of us are still in the “old
covenant” of law and order and merely external authority. Paul was far ahead of
most of history, and already pointed us toward what I call “second half of life
spirituality.”*
Finally, Paul is trying to create some “audiovisual aids” for this big message,
which he calls “churches” (a term used by Jesus only twice, in Matthew 16:18