St. Paul’s Letters Do Not Include All the Teachings of St. Paul

The Deepest Part of Catholic Teaching Is Not Written Down

Medium has many readers and writers who feel alienated from God because some Christians inform them that they are on the road to perdition. That question of who is saved and who is not has a long history in Christianity, much of it in the non-Catholic, Christian world.

Some believe virtually no one is saved and others believe virtually everyone is saved.

Some believe the saved are known only to God and not even to themselves. Others believe that living the virtues make you a shoe-in.

Some hear others condemn them to Hell for their one reason or another including, by the way, because they are Catholic.

One zealous evangelical told me I was going to Hell because I am Catholic. My response to him was simple: “Well since by your definition of Hell, you will not be there, then it will not be that much of a Hell for me after all.”

“Touché,” he responded.

Fortunately, in Catholicism we have documented teaching giving us a solid answer to the question.

Our Catechism teaches that it is simply those who remain obstinate in their sins to the end of their lives. They resist God’s grace even as it increases in the call to repentance. They remain adamant to their dying breath. Have I met people like this? Yes. Not many and you do not want to meet them.

People who condemn others always leave a piece out. Prayer is an essential part of living Christianity, if we are not teaching people to pray then we have no right to just be spouting off rules we must follow to be saved. The rules have to be understood in the context of prayer.

The fall of Eutychus

One Bible verse illustrates this well: Acts 20:7 one of the more unique Bible stories.

Paul is preaching on the third floor of a building in Troas. We do not know how many people were there, but one can assume that a decent number of interested gentile Christians. He speaks until midnight when a strange thing happens. A young adult, Eutychus, is among those present and listening. We do not know why, maybe because of the crowd, but he sits in the frame of an open window. As Paul continues preaching Eutychus falls asleep and falls out of the window and dies.

The members of the assembly immediately run down to his body. Paul prays over him and brings him back to life.

Then Paul, who obviously does not take this as a sign of him speaking too long, continues his conversations until dawn.

Doing the math

This whole incident began in Troas which today is Antalya, Turkey. Let us assume that St. Paul began his talk at 9:00pm. Therefore, he was speaking until midnight when Eutychus fell out the window. Then maybe after a half hour Eutychus is better and Paul returns to speak in the context what is called the breaking of the bread. He continues until dawn which we will say was around 7:30 am. I get that figure from timeanddate.com which gives sunrise and set information for anywhere at any time. I picked September 5th because that would be between the longest and shortest days of the year and offer an average of sunlight. On September 5th, sunrise was at 7:19am.

Now, my homilies are around one thousand words give or take two hundred. I use a teleprompter which is set to 123 words per minute. So to deliver a 1000 word homily takes 8.13 minutes. That means I would speak seven thousand three hundred and ninety words per hour.

Now I think it is reasonable to assume Paul began speaking at 9:00pm. He continues until midnight when Eutychus falls out of the window. So beginning again at 12:30 am, he spoke in one form or another until dawn. We will make dawn 7:30 am. Granted nothing would be that perfectly accurate especially since time measuring devices such as clocks and watches did not exist in his day. We can for this experiment assume that much time. 7390 words per hour x 10 hours =73,900 words. That is about ten thousand words more than all he wrote in the New Testament minus those epistles to Timothy and Titus because they are more personal letters,. We can see about 62,000 words in the Epistles from Romans through 2 Thessalonians.

Everything we use to teach the words of St. Paul would be less than or at most about the same amount of information of what he said in that one night. Paul taught for about twenty years.

Meanwhile, the entire Summa Theologica by St. Thomas Aquinas comes to over eleven hundred pages in the Coyote Canyon Press version; substantially more than what we find in Paul’s epistles combined. Towards the end of his life, Aquinas said that all he wrote is straw. We have no idea what it means except that the realities of God are far more profound than can be put into words. He was clearly a man of prayer.

We cannot converse with a text alone

You can expect some form of give and take with Paul as he is preaching. If he said something that someone would disagree with the person could ask Paul at that moment the why of the teaching. The community would remember that give and take as their understanding of Paul’s teaching deepened but it would not be part of any written record we have today. All we have is Paul’s letters to the community. Granted they too would be accompanied by discussions of what he mean but, again, they would not be part of the canon of Scripture.

Anyone who says this is what the Bible says therefore you must believe it does not give their hearers that luxury. They turn the bible into a set of rules like they were holding the driver’s license handbook.

Once we add prayer into the picture, because we understand Christianity as a personal relationship, we bring our questions on the rules into our prayer. In fact, a central part of our faith is speaking with God to grow in wisdom. All the saints did this. St. Augustine went from “Oh God give me celibacy but not now,” to “Too late have I loved you.” St. Francis went from loving everybody but lepers to loving lepers too.

St. Paul was a mystic. He admittedly understood mysteries of the universe to a level unknown in most circles even today (cf 2 Corinthians 12:2–4). He possessed a profound level of wisdom. To have the luxury of asking him why he taught what he taught would be a powerful opportunity.

The same could be said for Jesus as he associated with sinners. Admittedly they would do the same thing: ask him why he taught what he taught. Many of these would be the most marginalized members of society in the tax collectors and even the prostitutes but also every other kind of sinner in the Jewish mindset at the time. The last line of the Gospel of John reports that what is written of Jesus is a miniscule amount of all he said and did. So the overwhelming vast majority is unknown.

This continued throughout history. Catholic teaching which represents a deeper wisdom is something that must be brought to prayer and even argued with to be understood to its deeper level.

When we hold up the bible or even the catechism and state this is the rule and you must obey it or you will be condemned, we are not speaking anything Christian at all. That is not how Christ worked, it is not how St. Paul worked and it is not how we are to work. Our work must be in dialogue and in leading people to take their questions also to prayer to discover the deeper truths that cannot be found simply in a limited amount of words on a page, even if they are inspired writings. They must be found through that personal relationship with Christ. This is the point of the Holy Spirit’s work in the Church and the central role personal prayer has in the Catholic life.

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Photo: Jacques-François Courtin, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0 via Wikimedia Commons