The Conversion of Saint Paul the Apostle

Paul, or Saul as he was known until he became a Christian, was a Roman citizen, born at Tarsus, in present-day Turkey. He was brought up as a devoted Jew, studying in Jerusalem for a time under Gamaliel, the most famous rabbi of the day. Describing himself, he said, “I am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin” (Romans 11:1).

A few years after the death of Jesus, Saul came in contact with the new Christian movement, and became one of the most fanatical of those who were determined to stamp out this “dangerous heresy”. Saul witnessed the stoning of Stephen. He was on the way to Damascus to lead in further persecution of the Christians when his dramatic conversion took place.

From that day, Paul devoted his life totally to Jesus Christ, and especially to the conversion of Gentiles. The Acts of the Apostles describes the courage and determination with which he planted Christian congregations over a large aread of the land bordering the eastern Mediterranean Sea.

His letters, the earliest of Christian writings, reveal him as the greatest of the interpreters of Christ’s death and resurrection, and as the founder of Christian theology. He writes, “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20).

Paul describes himself as small and insignificant in appearance: “His letters are weighty and strong,” it was said of him, “but his bodily presence is weak, and his speech is of no account” (2 Corinthians 10:10). He writes of having a disability which he had prayed God to remove from him, and quotes the Lord’s reply, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore Paul went on to say, “I will al the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me (2 Corinthians 12:9).

Paul is believed to have been martyred at Rome in the year 64, during the persecution under the emperor Nero.

Adapted from Lesser Feasts and Fasts

Collect

O God, by the preaching of your apostle Paul you have caused the light of the Gospel to shine throughout the world: Grant, we pray, that we, having his wonderful conversion in remembrance, may show ourselves thankful to you by following his holy teaching; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

The propers for the commemoration of the Conversion of Saint Paul the Apostle are published on the Lectionary Page website.

Prayers to conclude the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

Gracious Father, we pray for your holy Catholic Church. Fill it with all truth, in all truth with all peace. Where it is corrupt, purify it; where it is in error, direct it; where in any thing it is amiss, reform it. Where it is right, strengthen it; where it is in want, provide for it; where it is divided, reunite it; for the sake of Jesus Christ your Son our Savior. Amen.

Almighty Father, whose blessed Son before his passion prayed for his disciples that they might be one, as you and he are one: Grant that your Church, being bound together in love and obedience to you, may be united in one body by the one Spirit, that the world may believe in him whom you have sent, your Son Jesus Christ our Lord; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Everliving God, whose will it is that all should come to you through your Son Jesus Christ: Inspire our witness to him, that all may know the power of his forgiveness and the hope of his resurrection; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

O God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, our only Savior, the Prince of Peace: Give us grace seriously to lay to heart the great dangers we are in by our unhappy divisions; take away all hatred and prejudice, and whatever else may hinder us from godly union and concord; that, as there is but one Body and one Spirit, one hope of our calling, one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism, one God and Father of us all, so we may be all of one heart and of one soul, united in one holy bond of truth and peace, of faith and charity, and may with one mind and one mouth glorify you; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

Today we pray for the Church in North America, for the Roman Catholic Church, for the United churches, and for ecumenical councils and consultations.

Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

Today we pray for the Church in Latin America and the Caribbean, and for Reformed, Presbyterian, Moravian and Lutheran churches.

Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

Today we pray for the Church in Africa, and for the Orthodox Churches, the Oriental Orthodox Churches, the Assyrian Church of the East, and the Mar Thoma Church.

The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

The week between the feasts of the Confession of Saint Peter and the Conversion of Saint Paul is observed as a Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. These dates were proposed by the Revd Fr Paul Wattson (founder of the Franciscan Friars of the Atonement and a pioneer in the cause of Christian unity) in 1908. The website for the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity notes that these dates are observed in the northern hemisphere, while in the southern hemisphere a week of prayer for Christian unity is often observed around Pentecost (as suggested by the Faith and Order Movement in 1926).

The website of the Pontifical Council has materials for observing the Week of Prayer for 2009.

For each day of the week, I will be posting intentions for intercession. I have lifted these in part from the Daily Prayer, Supplemental Liturgical Resource 5 (1987), published by the Office of Worship of the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the Cumberland Presbyterian Church.

Today let us pray for the Church of Jesus Christ in every land, and for the power of the Holy Spirit in the Church.

A day at the mall it ain’t

Anthony Sacramone has it exactly right in an entry in the First Things weblog:

Because we are faced with the fact of ecclesiological chaos does not make it healthy or desirable. I would argue that it may even be spiritually corrupting. Look, I’ve been there myself. As I wrote a while back in this space, I spent a good, long time—years—collecting church bulletins like frequent fliers collect air miles. But I never considered potluck Protestantism a great good. I was church shopping because I was looking for The Church and kept getting bounced back like an email with an old Prodigy.com domain name. I found the multiformity baffling, the sheer subjectivity and inconstancy depressing.

Read it all.

I confess that I, too, find church shopping – what a horrible phrase – oppressive and depressing.

Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

Today we pray for the Church in North America, for the United churches, and for ecumenical agencies and councils.

Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

Today we pray for the Church in Latin America and the Caribbean, and for Reformed, Presbyterian, Moravian and Lutheran churches.

Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

Today we pray for the Church in the Pacific region, and Baptist and other free churches and Pentecostal churches.

Of obtaining eternal salvation only by the Name of Jesus

Nearly five years ago, at the invitation of one of the editors, I wrote a response to an editorial published by Anglicans Online in which the writer opined that the doctrine drawn from the fourth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles and forming the basis of Article XVIII of the Articles of Religion (“Of Obtaining Eternal Salvation Only by the Name of Christ”); viz., that we may be saved only through Jesus’ Name, was a narrow doctrine leading to “crusades, cruelty, forced conversions, and a host of other non-Christ-like actions” that modern Christians could not hold.

Here is the text of my response of April 2003.

Acts 4.12 — Jesus is Lord

Throughout the pages of the New Testament the Gospel is presented as a public, universal message: that God has reconciled the world – the whole cosmos and all of humanity – to himself in Jesus, God’s Messiah. And in resurrection, God has declared this Jesus to be Lord, a resurrection that anticipates the transformation and renewal of humanity and of the whole world through Jesus.

From the beginning the witness to the gospel was public. Jesus proclaimed the reign of God in synagogues, hillside, and temple court, and the apostles followed his example in marketplace, law court, lecture hall, and synagogue. We even find a hint of the public and universal character of the Gospel in the apostolic community’s not naming itself by any of the Greek words current in the first century for movements or cults that promised personal salvation to those who availed themselves of that cult’s teachings or liturgical mysteries.

Instead, the early Christian texts denote the apostolic community by a secular, political word: ecclesia, the meeting of the citizens of the polis to deal with public matters. But this is an ecclesia, a public assembly, with a difference: it is the assembly of God, the assembly of those who confess that Jesus is Lord. And it is this apostolic confession of Jesus as the “Savior…the Messiah the Lord” (Luke 2:11) that would bring the early church into confrontation and conflict with a far-flung imperial regime that claimed Caesar as savior and universal lord. This conflict makes sense only insofar as the church was making this confession not as just one “religious” option among many but as a witness embracing the whole of life.

Extending the Jewish confession of YHWH as Lord of heaven and earth, and against an imperial politics claiming saving lordship as well against religious movements offering personal salvation, the church proclaims to all peoples and to every person the good news of Jesus’ universal lordship and the renewal, reconciliation and salvation of humanity (and of the whole cosmos) through him alone. It is not Caesar, “Savior and Lord”, who will save you, proclaimed the early church. It is not your participation in the worship of the ancient gods of Rome or in the Greek and Egyptian mystery cults that will save you. It is through Jesus, and him alone, that God will save you. Jesus will reconcile you to God, and in Jesus you – with all of humanity and the whole cosmos – will be renewed and transformed.

But, as children (even as errant postmodern children) of the Enlightenment, we greet such a claim with skepticism or with outright disbelief. Notions of salvation belong to a private, “religious” sphere, a sphere in which there can be no universal claims, but only personal ones. It most emphatically does not belong to a public, social sphere. The courtroom declaration of Peter and John in Acts 4:12 (read on Easter 3 in the Episcopal Church’s lectionary and on Easter 4 in the Revised Common Lectionary), that “there is no other name under heaven given… by which we must be saved” strikes us as “dogmatic”, exclusive, and dangerous.

When this dangerous and exclusive claim confronts us (in these very words from Acts) in Article XVIII of the Articles of Religion we are content, perhaps even anxious, to let the article slip back into its historical context (forgetting that Cranmer and his Elizabethan heirs actually framed the christological exclusivism – “Jesus only” – of this article as a gospel critique of a medieval institutional-ecclesiastical exclusivism – “Church only”). We confess Jesus as Way, Truth, and Life, but we stop at the universal implications of his lordship. We will gladly speak to those who would ask us of Jesus and our trust in him (as indeed we should), but a public proclamation of the Gospel to believers in other faiths or in no faith at all strikes us as insensitive, narrow, and possibly even dangerously on the way to crusade and forced conversion.

In all honesty, we must admit that the church has at times mistaken coercion for evangelism – and the fault there lies in human sin, not in our Lord’s command to proclaim the good news. In this time between the Resurrection and the fullness of the Kingdom in the Second Coming of our Lord, the same church that is the Body of Christ has also been guilty of unchristlike actions. But over against the forced conversion of the Saxons by Charlemagne, the expulsions and forced conversions of the Reconquista and other such coercive movements, the history of Christian witness is overwhelmingly the history of women and men who, in fulfilling the apostolic calling to proclaim Jesus as Savior and Lord to every person and to all peoples without distinction, have known their witness to the Gospel to be a fulfillment of their love of God and neighbor.

The proclamation of the Gospel invites the commitment of all people to Jesus as Savior and Lord, but our witness to Jesus as universal Lord and Savior must be accompanied by the sign of unity. The one Shepherd is Lord over one flock, the ONE, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. Disunity between traditions and denominations, as well as divisions based on race, culture, ethnicity, or wealth and social standing make us liars when we claim to acknowledge Jesus as Lord over all. Commitment to Jesus as Lord makes us members of one apostolic and catholic (universal) community of witness, the community of those who are being reconciled and renewed in Jesus, who even now embody (if only provisionally and imperfectly) the coming reign of God, who are called live out the great sign of Jesus’ lordship: eating together at the same Lord’s Table without ethnic or cultural distinctions, without racial or class divisions, and without denominational divisions.

The text as published originally at Anglicans Online is here.