Below are extracted paragraphs by Charles Bledsoe in BSA’s form “God, Faith & Theology” here. He expresses his view that Paul and Paul’s followers’ concern is “is a promise of personal liberation from death, and the absence of a robust ethical spirituality, or a spirituality that understands love of God as an end in itself,“
Having just finished reading Paul Within Paganism I thought I’d share some thoughts about what struck me most about Paul, early Christ believers, and their soteriology—what “salvation” meant for them.
In sum, Paulism boils Christ, Christ followership, the ritual of baptism, and Christian salvation, et al, down to a mechanism of immortalizing participation in divine pneuma. The ultimate concern of Paul and early Pauline Christians was eternal life rather than God. They were in it to get imperishable pneumatic bodies, God was just the source of this indestructible pneuma whose favor had to be won by faithfulness and obedience. This made for piety with an ulterior motive. Paul’s line “there is no one who seeks God” comes to mind. Through their Christ faith and following he and his proselytes sought their own “salvation” rather than God. At any rate, that’s how they come across to me.
Yes, as Pedersen admonishes, I really shouldn’t restrict myself to elucidating this single takeaway from Paul Within Paganism, this specific striking feature of Paulism, but such a lamentable emphasis on a self-serving and eschatological piety whose main selling point is a promise of personal liberation from death, and the absence of a robust ethical spirituality, or a spirituality that understands love of God as an end in itself, alas seems to define the Christ-faith of Paul and his followers to a disappointing extent—and the Christ-faith of many today, which is still more ultimately concerned with personal immortality than with what’s ultimately meaningful.
