God’s wisdom really is according to a plan from all eternity” (3:10). He describes
the experience as being like if scales had fallen from his eyes, so that “he could
see again” (Acts 9:18).
In Paul’s story we find the archetypal spiritual pattern, wherein people move
from what they thought they always knew to what they now fully recognize.
The pattern reveals itself earlier in the Torah when Jacob “wakes from his sleep”
on the rock at Bethel and says, in effect, “I found it, but it was here all the time!
This is the very gate of heaven” (Genesis 28:16).
For the rest of his life, Paul became obsessed with this “Christ.” “Obsessed” is
not too strong a word. In his letters, Paul rarely, if ever, quotes Jesus himself
directly. Rather, he writes from a place of trustful communication with the
Divine Presence who blinded him on the road. Paul’s driving mission was “to
demonstrate that Jesus was the Christ” (Acts 9:22b), which is why we are called
“Christians” to this day, and not Jesuits!
Describing the encounter in his letter to the Galatians, Paul writes a most
telling line. He does not say “God revealed his Son to me” as you might expect.
Instead, he says, “God revealed his Son in me” (Galatians 1:16). This high degree
of trust, introspection, self- knowledge, and self-confidence was quite unusual at
that time. In fact, we will hardly see anything comparable till Augustine’s
Confessions, written around A.D. 400, where the author describes the inner life
with a similar interest and precision. In my opinion, this is why the first fifteen
hundred years of Christianity did not make much of Paul—he was so interior
and psychological, and civilization was still so extroverted and literal. Except for
the rare Augustine, and many of the Catholic mystics and hermits, it took more
widespread literacy and the availability of the written word in the sixteenth
century to move us toward a more interior and introspective Christianity, both
for good and for ill.*1
After his soul-blindness lifted, Paul recognized his true identity as a “chosen
instrument” of the Christ, whose followers he used to persecute (Acts 9:15). In a
move that could’ve seemed presumptuous, he presents himself as one of the
twelve apostles, and even dares to take on both the Jewish leaders of his day and
the leaders of the new Christian movement (Galatians 2:11–14, Acts 15:1–
11)despite having no official role or legitimacy in either group. As far as I know,
this self-ordination—not by lineage or appointment, but by divine validation—
is unprecedented in these two sacred traditions, except for the few who were
called “prophets” or “chosen ones.” Either Paul was a total narcissist or he really
was “chosen.” This is the inherently unstable, even dangerous, role of true