I want you to imagine with me that you have a best friend who invented a game. They only taught you and a handful of others how to play the game and then they entrusted you to teach the world how to play it. The game they invented began to spread and grow in popularity. As the game is evolving and people are implementing it from country to country, they begin coming to you with questions. After all, where else would they go? Some are playing the game well but are limiting its potential for fun. Others are totally ruining the game completely. They have taken the objects of the game and the form of it, but when they say “go” it resembles nothing of what you were taught by your friend. Still others are pretty good at it and only mess up a few rules here and there. They just want to keep learning the intricacies of the game from you.
The example provided gives us a brief insight into what it was like to be an Apostle, and specifically the Apostle Paul, after Jesus of Nazareth left this earth. Yes, the Spirit of God was sent at Pentecost (see Acts 2), but God had chosen for the movement of disciples of His Son Jesus to go forward not through crazy signs in the sky, but through clear and consistent teaching of the message about His Son from place to place.
As that message about who He is and what He has done is proclaimed, the Spirit of God gives people faith and people put their trust in Jesus. They begin living out what He taught as a church community. It is through the gathering and scattering of these church communities throughout the world in the first century that led to the Christian movement as we now know it taking off worldwide. In addition to the stories about the life of Jesus captured in the gospel accounts, the writings of a few apostles, most notably Paul, had a significant impact on the spread and health of that early Christian movement.
That’s all well and good, but why did Paul need to write thirteen letters? At some level, shouldn’t this be pretty easy to get across in one letter? Believe in Jesus. Trust His finished work. He died for you. Love God. Love your neighbor. Be full of the Spirit. Go. However, the task at hand proved to be more complex and layered. The churches Paul helped start (Philippians, Colossians, etc.), the individuals he commissioned to oversee healthy church development (like Timothy and Titus), and the churches he was corresponding with for missional purposes (such as the churches in Rome) were all experiencing unique issues in understanding and implementing the gospel.
There are three big headings of issues we see in Paul's address in his thirteen letters. First, we see an array of lifestyle and ethical issues. At times some churches were flat out continuing to live sinful lifestyles as if knowing Jesus was just about being forgiven but had no bearing on how we live our lives. Second, we also see an array of unity and ethnic issues. Much like Jesus’ ministry, the early church was largely Jewish to begin with and slowly began to spread to the Gentiles more and more until the Gentiles outnumbered the Jews. At that point, there were Judaizing influences who wanted to leverage their power to incite fear in Gentiles that if they did not prescribe to certain Jewish customs, they were not being faithful. On the flip side, as congregations began to take on more of a Gentile majority, they could at times look down on their Jewish brothers and sisters. Lastly, we see an array of missional issues. If it was happening that Jew and Gentiles struggled at times to get along in churches, it makes sense that these churches struggled with Paul’s desire to take the gospel to even more unreached peoples and places. It didn’t seem mission critical to them. So in each of these cases, whether Paul was dealing with a church or individual firsthand or secondhand through a report he heard, he had to speak to what he was hearing because it was inconsistent with the gospel he preached to them and that they claimed to be representing to the surrounding world.
As we begin to dive into each letter, we are shocked to find a consistent prescription to each church: the gospel itself! No matter how broad or specific the unity, ethics, or missional issues are, we see Paul consistently prescribe the gospel as the solution. And Paul was not changing the gospel by applying it in each of these situations. What we have in the thirteen letters is some of the best writing in the history of the world where the depths of the gospel’s riches are applied to churches. Each letter has a unique context in terms of setting, time, tone, theme, introduction, and closing. But what they share in common is that each letter goes to the depths of the gospel theme needed for that church or those individuals to embody the person of Christ through the Spirit’s empowerment.
With all of that as our backdrop, let’s circle back to the question raised by the title of this article. “What would Paul say to the church of America today?”
I looked this very question up a few months ago as I was preparing for this series. A leading New Testament scholar was asked this question on the spot and said “I think he’d say something he already said in his 13 Letters.” That is the moment where I was confronted with a simple yet profound truth. I have not begun to mine the depths of the gospel laid out in these thirteen letters. I need to continue to see the life of Jesus lived out in the gospels while I also immerse myself in the book of Acts and the Pauline epistles to see how this beautiful good news about the person of Jesus was being applied to the first churches and followers of Jesus in the midst of their ethical, unity, and missional issues. All of my personal struggles to follow Jesus and those of the church I have the privilege to pastor fall into those buckets. We don’t need a fresh letter written today to the church. The church needs to retrieve the thirteen letters that are ever old and yet still ever new. We do indeed have 13 letters and they all help paint a unified picture of our 1 gospel.