Why isn’t Paul ashamed of the gospel?
I confess that I have been ashamed of the gospel. The Apostle Paul’s bold claim — ”I am not ashamed of the gospel” (Rom 1:16 NIV) — has often left me feeling guilty. His experience has not always been mine. Instead, I have often felt inadequate to the task of explaining Christian belief to a shrewd skeptic. As such I have often withdrawn from explaining my faith or, worse, become defensive and hostile toward skepticism. Bottom line, I have feared being put to shame.
Thankfully things are changing. I’m learning why and how Paul was not ashamed. In his own words, Paul is not ashamed of the gospel “because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes” (Rom 1:16). To Paul, the gospel is not merely a set of beliefs to defend, but an experienced world and life-transforming power. This experienced power amounts to well-grounded hope.
What does this experience of divine power amount to? Supernatural power to love as God loves, particularly love of enemies, as demonstrated by Jesus. Paul writes, “hope [in God] does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us” (Rom 5:5). Philosopher Paul K. Moser has identified this passage as “the most important epistemological statement in the New Testament and in Christian literature generally” (Moser 2013, 102). The idea here is that St. Paul knows that his hope is not in vain because he — a former murderer of Christians — has received divine power to love as God loves.
Why does this power bring salvation? Paul writes, “if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you” (Rom 8:11). The idea here is that (1) the supernatural power to love as God loves and (2) the power to defeat death through resurrection come from the same source — the Spirit of God, also known as the Spirit of Christ. Resurrection power cannot be divorced from divine heart-transformation since “if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, they do not belong to Christ. . . . [and] those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God” (Rom 8:9, 14).
Once I start to think of the gospel as power rather than theory I am humbled by how poorly grounded my knowledge of the gospel turns out to be. I have much, much deeper to go in terms of inviting and receiving the power of God to love as God loves. I want to declare with Paul that I am not ashamed of the gospel on the basis of deeper life-transformation or not at all.
WORK CITED
Moser, Paul K. 2013. The Severity of God: Religion and Philosophy Reconceived. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Originally published at bennasmith.wordpress.com on February 4, 2015.
