St Paul: A heavy cross to bear: St Paul’s doctrinal legacy includes antisemitism, misogyny, homophobia and the divine right of kings. Thankfully, there is another tradition, personified by Archbishop Desmond Tutu
St Paul called them “visions and revelations granted to me by the Lord”. Applying one modern psychiatrist’s test — “if you speak to God it’s religion, if God speaks to you it’s psychosis” — we would see them as a temporary loss of contact with reality.
His authorship of certain epistles has been challenged, but there can be no doubt about Paul’s troubled psyche — his tumultuous, conflict-torn inner life, unpredictable vagaries and hypermanic drive. His agonised cry, “I do not even acknowledge my own actions as mine, for what I do … I detest”, underlines his psychological turmoil. He complains of a skolops sent by Satan, interpreted by some as sexual temptation. Paul’s exaggerated revulsion for “the base pursuits of the flesh” is well-attested.
As a Pharisee and “Hebrew born and bred”, Paul’s most influential volte-face was his rejection of theBorn of his idea that “the new Creation” ushered in by the Crucifixion had replaced God’s covenant with the Jews, he was typically extreme, calling the Mosaic law one of “sin and death” and his former adherence to it “sheer loss”.
Elsewhere, he speaks of “Jewish myths and commandments of merely human origin”. In a sideswipe at Peter and other Jerusalem church leaders, he warns against “those dogs and their malpractices. Beware of those who insist on mutilation — ‘circumcision’ I will not call it.” Evil is no mere quality of human action: it is an objective, all-encompassing metaphysical reality, which Paul comes close to portraying, like the dualistic Manicheans, as God’s dark antagonist: “Our fight is … against cosmic powers, against the authorities and potentates of this dark world, against the superhuman forces of evil in the heavens.”
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