I mean to take St. Paul’s Epistles in the order the Canon gives them. But there is one passage so important in itself, so important for linking St. Luke’s narrative to the inner life of the Apostle, and so important because it comes in the very Epistle that brings out the clash between St. Peter and St. Paul at Antioch—the Epistle modern Paulinists therefore love above all others—that I must use it to introduce everything I say afterward.
It is this (Gal. i. 15, 16): “But when it pleased God, who had chosen me from my mother’s womb, and called me by His grace to reveal His Son in me, that I might preach him among the Gentiles, immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood.” This is, strictly, St. Paul’s own account of his conversion. No one supposes he made light of the vision on the road to Damascus; he tells it again and again with its details, and assumes the Galatians know it—no lesser fact could bridge the gap between the man who persecuted the Church and the man who preached the faith he once destroyed. But we want more than the outward fact; we want to know what it meant, what inner process matched it, what was disclosed to the Apostle’s mind that a light in the sky could not disclose. Here he tells us: “It pleased God to reveal His Son in me.” God showed me that there was One whose warnings and invitations I had been resisting, One who was my Lord, and yet whom I had been persecuting. This revelation first blinded and bewildered me, then lit up all the dark places of my earlier life. From this Son of God had come every right desire and true thought I had ever had; from myself, resisting Him, had come all that was false and evil. But was this Son of God only in me? Was He revealed to me only so that I might know my own good and my own evil—because I was different from my Jewish brethren, or merely because I was one of them? No; He was revealed in me so that I might preach Him among the Gentiles. I was made to understand what was true of me as a man, and so was fitted to be a missionary to men. In this way too I fulfilled the calling of a Jew, chosen from my mother’s womb to help carry out the covenant to Abraham: “In thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed.” So I could not confer with flesh and blood or lean for now on outward teaching; I went into Arabia to learn in silence what this communication meant for me and for the world, and to wait for the answer to my question: “Lord, what wouldst thou have me to do?”
So I hold we have the highest warrant for believing St. Paul’s special work was to carry this message to the nations: to tell men that the Son of God was in them, that He was the true head and root of their humanity, and that apart from Him they had no life, righteousness, or unity at all. He was to show this in relation to what men found in their own minds, to history, to the calling of the chosen people, to their law, to the order of society, and to the world’s condition past, present, and future. He was to show how our Lord’s Incarnation, death, resurrection, and ascension bore on His relation to human beings, explained the riddle of their existence, and answered the countless facts, outward and inward, that seemed to argue against His real fellowship with them and rule over them.
This, I say, is the rough idea one would form of the aim of St. Paul’s life from this memorable passage. By taking it as the basis of our inquiry we may be able to trace the distinct aims of his several epistles more clearly, without departing from the accepted maxims about them—provided those maxims are not flatly at odds with what the Apostle himself says.