As one of my more quiet acts of service in the local congregation, I write an almost-weekly blog post for my local congregation, and hitherto I have had no reason to comment about it here, as I have kept my posts separate, providing original material there that reflects basic concerns I have written about elsewhere and that responds to either sermonette or sermon messages in the local area, while keeping the length of my posts there somewhat shorter than my posts on here (generally four to five paragraphs, 500 words or less, as a goal, a difficult goal given how wordy I am by nature). I found today, though, that the most recent post I had written had not been shown, and when I re-wrote it from scratch, I found that the text did not show on the link either, for reasons unbeknownst to me. Since I thought the point I had made about the behavior about the Apostle Paul to be important enough, I have decided to share it here, since I am now writing this blog entry for the third time (much like the poor scribe Baruch having to rewrite a text dictated by Jeremiah and adding to it once his original message had been destroyed by the wicked king Jehoiakim (see Jeremiah 36:27-32).

There are many reasons why we celebrate Paul as an example for ourselves to follow. One of the less well known reasons why Paul’s behavior as a minister of God is worthy of celebration and (where applicable) emulation is the attitude Paul had towards his authority and domain. In this corrupt world, authorities are either prone to avoid fulfilling their responsibilities given to them by God or are eager to overstep their boundaries and seek authority in areas where they have not been given proper authority. As a refreshing antidote to this corrupt and ungodly way of handling authority, Paul himself had very clear attitudes towards authority and he was both zealous to fulfill his authority as well as scrupulous in avoiding overstepping his boundaries, in a manner that is rarely to be seen today.

Paul’s attitude towards his authority, given to him by God (and not seized ambitiously for himself), can be found in Romans 15:14-21: “Now I myself am confident concerning you, my brethren, that you also are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge, able also to admonish one another. Nevertheless, brethren, I have written more boldly to you on some points, as reminding you, because of the grace given to me by God, that I might be a minister of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles, ministering the gospel of God, that the offering of the Gentiles might be acceptable, sanctified by the Holy Spirit. Therefore I have reason to glory in Christ Jesus in the things which pertain to God. For I will not dare to speak of any of those things which Christ has not accomplished through me in word and deed, to make the Gentiles obedient–in mighty signs and wonders, by the power of the Spirit of God, so that from Jerusalem and round about to Illyricum I have fully preached the gospel of Christ. And so I have made it my aim to preach the gospel, not where Christ was named, lest I should build on another man’s foundation, but as it is written: “To whom he was not announced, they shall see; and those who have not heard shall understand.”

Here we can see very plainly that Paul was very intent on not building on another man’s foundation. To the greatest extent possible, he wanted to be a trailblazer, preaching Jesus Christ boldly in territory where no missionary or preacher had gone before, to bring the message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to people unfamiliar with it, leaving the consolidation of those congregations to others while he would continually break forth into new territory once he had fully preached the message in one area. While we are unfamiliar with such trailblazing missionary work today in many religious traditions, being more content to preach the gospel where it is already heard, and to build on the foundations of generations and generations of work by others and to seek the fruits of those labors for ourselves, Paul had a vastly more adventuresome spirit and a much greater interest in trailblazing efforts.

The original twelve apostles (along with Christ’s half-brother James) were basically content to let Paul and Barnabas lead the effort to preaching God’s word in the Roman Empire without any sort of interference whatsoever. As it is written in Galatians 2:6-10: “But from those who seemed to be something–whatever they were, it makes no difference to me; God shows personal favoritism to no man–for those who seemed to be something added nothing to me. But on the contrary, when they saw that the gospel for the uncircumcised had been committed to me, as the gospel for the circumcised was to Peter (for He who worked effectively in Peter for the apostleship to the circumcised also worked effectively in me toward the Gentiles), and when James, Cephas [Peter], and John, who seemed to be pillars, perceived the grace that had been given to me, they gave me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship, that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised. They desired only that we should remember the poor, the very thing which I also was eager to do.”

Here we see that the other apostles were eager and willing to let Paul and Barnabas minister to the entire Gentile world of the Roman Empire (which had tens of millions of people at the time), while they ministered to the much smaller and much more biblically literate (and much more familiar) population of the Jews of the diaspora. Paul, rather than seeing this vastly larger (and more difficult task) as unfair, was very eager to fulfill his duties and to focus his efforts on the Gentiles, not overstepping his authority in any way, but also zealously performing his duties within his area of authority. Some of the implications of this are worthy of mention. For one, since Peter was very zealous in giving Paul the authority over the work of the Gentiles while he (and the rest of the twelve, and James and Jude, presumably) focused on the circumcision, Peter’s work was geared in those areas where the Jews already had settled in number, which included parts of what is now Turkey and the rest of the Middle East. Likewise, since Paul did not go where other apostles had already laid a foundation, Paul’s presence and mighty work in Rome and his claiming authority over the congregation of Rome means very bluntly that Peter did not have that jurisdiction nor did he preach there during his ministry. This, of course, makes the whole edifice of the apostolic succession of the Roman Catholic Church [1] crumble.

It should be noted that Paul himself was extremely quick, surprisingly so, to abandon efforts to preaching with the Jews at the earliest sign of hostility. We see this, for example, in Acts 13:42-52, and Acts 28:17-31. As soon as the Jews contradicted the prophecies pointing to Jesus Christ, or showed envy at the success of Paul in preaching to the Gentiles compared to their own lack of success at evangelism, Paul was quick to leave them to dispute among themselves while he wholeheartedly went to preach the Gentiles. Rather than deal with those who had to unlearn their own interpretations or who thought their own grasp of God’s truth to be greater than it was, Paul preferred to deal with those who were more of a blank slate, who were more teachable and more humble because they came with fewer presuppositions and false foundations. And so Paul, in seeking not to build on another man’s foundation, and in scrupulously avoiding crossing over his boundaries, can set us an example to in dealing with lines of authority and avoiding the blurred lines that are all too common in our corrupt and ungodly times. May we profit by his example.

[1] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/03/30/on-the-follies-of-apostolic-succession/