Some years ago I came across a translation of the New Testament by the Jewish German Heinz Cassirer. He was the son of Immanuel Kant scholar Ernst Cassirer. Heinz too became a Kant scholar. When the Third Reich came to power he fled Germany for Britain. Around 50 years old he was converted to Christ.
I just started his book Grace and Law: St. Paul, Kant, and the Hebrew Prophets. It is priceless; a sort of ‘spiritual and intellectual autobiography.’ He puts into words so many of the thoughts you have probably had about Paul and his personality.
There are many features of St. Paul’s mental make-up which at first sight appear most objectionable, and indeed wholly inexcusable––features, incidentally, which have been strenuously overlooked or else whittled down by Christians throughout the ages––for example, his emotionalism, his habit of making personal remarks about others, his perpetually talking about himself, about the sacrifices he has made and the sufferings he has endured, his self-assertiveness and aggressiveness, leading him many a time to adopt an attitude towards others which bears every appearance of sheer browbeating. Whether there is any real justification in these charges is a point which will not come up for consideration until much later in this book. However, it could hardly be fairly maintained that there was the least evidence in St. Paul’s character of any tendency to compromise or to lend himself to the telling of untruths or half-truths. On the contrary, what strikes one about him, and does so most forcibly, is that, once he has taken up a position, he abides by it to the point of ruthlessness, and, moreover, that his pronouncements are frequently honest and self-revealing to the point of naiveté.
And this, talking about Galatians:
Before going on to examine the text in detail, I should like to comment briefly upon the method St. Paul employs in developing his argument. I may convey my own impression best by saying that there is no method at all, but that on the contrary St. Paul pours forth his thoughts and feelings without having laid down any definite plan in advance. This procedure, which is typical of St. Paul, and which becomes prominent not only here but in a great many other places as well, has, it seems to me, great advantages when feelings or spiritual experiences of a particularly complex and intangible kind are to be communicated. Indeed, however advisable it may be in other fields to rely upon orderly and systematic presentation, in a case like the present and similar ones, the writer will have a much better chance of making himself intelligible if he allows his ideas to shape themselves in a way that at any given moment feels natural. He must not let himself be impeded by the thought that, for the sake of clarity and consistency, they ought to be pressed into a rigid scheme. There are, it will be agreed, a good many theologians who tend to develop their arguments in an over-scrupulous and exaggeratedly punctilious manner, while St. Paul may fairly be charged with sometimes going to the other extreme. Yet, as far as I am concerned, I confess that, even as regards those aspects of St. Paul’s doctrine which are hardest to make sense of, I find his own presentation invariably much more illuminating than what is substituted for it by those whose aim is lucidity and order.
Maybe pastors should start preaching from the hip?––or, rather, the heart?
I’ve not gotten to Cassirer’s conclusions, but I’ve enjoyed his analysis so far. You will have to put up with some nods to higher critical nonsense here and there, but thankfully he is usually dismissive of these things, or at least doesn’t seem bothered by it.
