Paul's Gospel may be stranger than you thought

This morning's reading got me thinking.

Galatians 1:11-12 For I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin; for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.

What struck me was that a revelation of Jesus Christ is said here to be the gospel. Now, cross-referencing to the accounts in Acts of Paul's vision of Christ on the Damascus road gives us an intriguing idea of what the gospel might be. Presumably it is this vision that Paul is referring to in this passage, so we need to be able to understand the word "gospel" in such as way as to include what happened with Paul on the Damascus road.

We get a bit more detail, in verses 15-16

But when God, who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace, was pleased ¹⁶to reveal his Son to me, so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles

This reinforces the revelation of Christ to Paul aspect of the 'gospel' and adds explicitly a commissioning element. In terms of what we get to see in Acts, this pretty much seems to sum it up.

But let's have a quick look at the passages in question in Acts. First, Acts 9:3ff

...as [Paul] was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. 4 He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?’ 5 He asked, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ The reply came, ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. 6 But get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.’

It seems to me that the basic thing in that revelation-encounter was that Jesus is the Lord and that challenges, implicitly, Paul's course of action in persecuting the Lord's people. The story in Acts 22 is pretty much the same:

While I was on my way and approaching Damascus, about noon a great light from heaven suddenly shone about me.  I fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to me, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”  I answered, “Who are you, Lord?” Then he said to me, “I am Jesus of Nazareth[b] whom you are persecuting.”  Now those who were with me saw the light but did not hear the voice of the one who was speaking to me. 

And a bit later in Acts 26 Paul gives more detail (verse 12ff):

I was travelling to Damascus with the authority and commission of the chief priests, when at midday along the road, your Excellency, I saw a light from heaven, brighter than the sun, shining around me and my companions. When we had all fallen to the ground, I heard a voice saying to me in the Hebrew language, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? It hurts you to kick against the goads.” I asked, “Who are you, Lord?” The Lord answered, “I am Jesus whom you are persecuting. But get up and stand on your feet; for I have appeared to you for this purpose, to appoint you to serve and testify to the things in which you have seen me and to those in which I will appear to you. I will rescue you from your people and from the Gentiles—to whom I am sending you to open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.

This version indicates a couple of further things. One is that Paul knew he was being spiritually goaded towards recognising Jesus as Lord. The other thing is the commissioning of Paul as, in effect, apostle to the gentiles.
I'm intrigued, however, to note that in none of these do we get the kind of gospel that many Christians nowadays would say was essential. There is no cross and resurrection, no explicit call to repentance and faith. There only seems to be an event that makes Paul realise that Jesus really is the Lord and a commission to serve and bear witness.

So, what I'm wrestling with now is how I feel about the idea that 'the gospel' might simply be an encounter with Christ that leads us to recognise Jesus as Lord. I guess that in context I can see that there are implications in the story of Paul's Damascus Road encounter -but in terms of proclamation it is interesting that these are implied contextually, not explicitly stated. The implications I see are the Lordship (deity?) of Christ, the life, death and resurrection of Christ, and the fulfilment of God's purposes in those things and the implication of 'repentance' as a new direction in life is taken up. But the centring of gospel in this instance on life-changing encounter with Christ seems to suggest that all those implications are more about helping people to come to, recognise and respond to the encounter.

Of course, there are also implications about the role of the Holy Spirit (the producer, presumably, of the goads in Paul's life).

I can sense that maybe I'm going to be returning to this later. But I'm thinking that this seems to foreground the idea of evangelism as initial spiritual direction which I've blogged about before (see the penultimate section in this article).

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