Conversion of Paul

Revised and reprinted from 2023.

“Right dear in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints”. Even if the actual date of the feast of a saint is determined by some other event (the translation of their relics or the consecration of a church in their honor), what the feast day itself commemorates is the witness to Christ that the saint completed by death and entrance into supernal glory. There are three exceptions to this rule: the Nativity of John the Baptist, the Annunciation of Saint Mary the Virgin, and the Conversion of Saint Paul the Apostle (which fell on Saturday past, but was anticipated on Thursday evening), each in its own way significant in the history of salvation. The importance of Paul’s conversion is evident from its being recounted no less than three times in the Acts of the Apostles (ch 9; 22; 26). In his appearance to Paul Christ commissioned him as a “chosen vessel” to bear his name among the Gentiles, “to open their eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins, and inheritance among them which are sanctified by faith that is in me” (26:18). The zeal Paul poured into ferocious persecution of the church must now be invested in the fervent preaching of the gospel.

It is possible to overstate Paul’s importance. He was not the first to take the gospel to the Gentiles. Peter’s ministry in Caesarea (Acts 10), and Barnabas’ ministry in Antioch (Acts 11) show that it is the Spirit who led the way, and the institutional Church played catchup as best it could. Though Paul then takes a leading role in the first intentional mission to the Gentiles, he does so only in a team that includes others like Barnabas and Silas, Aquila and Prisca, Timothy and Titus; and long before he arrives in Rome a church had already been established. In addition, before Paul’s conversion, the conversion of Cornelius had already taught Peter that you don’t need to be Jewish in order to be Christian, and that salvation for both Jews and Gentiles was by the grace of Jesus Christ, and not by doing the works of the law (Acts 15:7-11). It’s true that Paul holds more tenaciously to the principles of the gospel than anyone else, when even stalwarts like Peter and Barnabas were temporizing on the exemption of Gentile converts from legal observance of the law (Gal. 2:11ff). But Paul did not singlehandedly shape or reshape the religion of Jesus (as some claim). He was far from a one-man show – the besetting temptation of too many charismatic religious personalities. What sets him apart is is this: though other disciples left us their testimony to the gospel in writings acknowledged as canonical, no one articulated more clearly and as extensively the meaning and implications of the gospel for the doctrines of God, of Christ and of the Spirit, of justification, moral life, the church, its ministry and sacraments, of the church’s relation to earthly kingdoms, and of Christian hope in the face of death. And all of it flows from his conversion, from the manifestation of Christ’s glory to him on the road to Damascus.

For what is conversion? In revivalistic piety, it is often understood as an intense emotional experience, and is conflated (mistakenly) with “being born again”. An experience it is, and one that involves the emotions, though “high emotional temperature” as Robert Crouse drily remarked, “is no clear symptom of conversion”. (Fr Ralston recalled hearing an excited radio preacher exclaim, “Oh, Oh, I don’t know what I am feeling, but Oh, how I feel it!”). Sometimes, as in Paul’s case, conversion is dramatic; but (as Crouse also said),

Conversion is not fundamentally a matter of blinding lights and secret voices, but a matter of a new integration of personality around a new centre, a new focus of insight and energies. “I live, yet not I, but Christ in me” (Gal. 2:10).

The energies of the mind and will are centered on Christ, and so there follows (as Romans 12:2 says) a transformation of the entire self “by the renewal of the mind”, no longer conformed to this world and its wisdom. Thus for Paul the manifestation of the glory of the risen Christ – an epiphany! – required the entire rethinking from the ground up of everything he believed – and it is the fruits of that rethinking that we have in his letters.

Thus Saint Paul’s conversion also shows us is that what starts in the inner life of the individual does not stop there: for conversion is not only recentering insight but also refocusing vocation – a vocation indeed of conversion, a conversion which is not an isolated event, but a process, an ongoing conversion of all humanity, of the whole creation, to the Creator, and its being transformed, refashioned after his likeness, filled with his glory – the glory that is manifested in Christ Jesus. “Arise, shine, for they light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee”.