Immediately after the Gospels, the New
Testament takes up the history of the early Christian
Church, describing the works of the twelve disciples,
and introducing Paul, the man whose influence on the
history of Christianity is beyond calculation. Teacher,
preacher, conciliator, diplomat, theologian, rule giver,
consoler, and martyr, his life and writings became
foundations for Christianity. Paul inspired a vast,
serious, and intelligent literature that seeks to
recapture his meaning, his thinking, and his purpose.
In his letters to early Christian
communities, Paul gave much practical advice about
organization and orthodoxy. These treated the early
Christian communities as something more than a group of
people who believed in the same faith: they were people
bound together by a common spirit unknown before. The
significance of that common spirit occupied the greatest
of Christian theologians from Athanasius and Augustine
through Luther and Calvin.
In
The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle
Albert Schweitzer goes against Luther and the Protestant
tradition to look at what Paul actually writes in the
Epistles to the Romans and Galatians: an emphasis upon
the personal experience of the believer with the divine.
Paul's mysticism was not like the mysticism elsewhere
described as a soul being at one with God. In the
mysticism he felt and encouraged, there is no loss of
self but an enriching of it; no erasure of time or place
but a comprehension of how time and place fit within the
eternal. Schweitzer writes that Paul's mysticism is
especially profound, liberating, and precise. Typical of
Schweitzer, he introduces readers to his point of view
at once, then describes in detail how he came to it, its
scholarly antecedents, what its implications are, what
objections have been raised, and why all of this
matters. To students of the New Testament, this book
opens up Paul by presenting him as offering an entirely
new kind of mysticism, necessarily and exclusively
Christian.
"There is at least one
other point that Albert Schweitzer scores here... The
hard-won recognition that divine authority and human
freedom ultimately cannot be in conflict must never be
taken for granted, and the irony that the thought of
Paul has repeatedly been invoked to undo that
recognition truly does make this insight one of 'the
permanent elements.'"—from the Introduction
