In a little piece for his blog¹, Mr. Andrew Springer excoriates the Apostle Paul. Or, rather, he promises to do so with its title, “Why I Hate Paul (And The Religion He Made Up)”.

The essay opens up with his recollection of a heroic moment at seminary where a professor asked the students why they were taking his course on Paul, and Mr. Springer responded with the non-sequitur, “I can’t stand Paul.” As he mounted the conference table, and shook his fist, he charged that “Nobody has done more to corrupt the original message of Jesus of Nazareth than Paul—a guy who never even met Jesus.” Everyone cheered, and a student beside him winked knowingly, quietly approving of his subterfuge.

Except in nearly every paragraph after we learn that “Christianity is not the religion of Jesus [but] the religion of Paul”, we are faced with assertions that our understanding of Paul is mostly a fiction. Sure, there’s a historical Paul, but a lot of letters we attribute to him are not his at all, and those are the letters where “a lot of the worst stuff lives”. I suppose it’s good that this very bad stuff is in the apocryphal letters, and not the canon, but if less worse stuff nevertheless remains in holy scripture, then this must be according to some unarticulated and invariably very neutral moral doctrine that is distinct from scripture itself. Which is to say that scripture loses its primacy to our gut and the vibe.

Mr. Springer continues, assuring the reader that we don’t “want to paint Paul as an entirely bad guy … There is much to admire: he was a radical egalitarian, and genuinely valued and worked with women when to do so was a dangerous act.” In fact, “Paul doesn’t entirely deserve the bad rap he’s gotten.”

At this point, the reader may be justly confused. Paul was surely wronged by his purported forgers in all this, and besides, he’s a radical feminist revolutionary or something. Why is he to be hated?

We approach a solution to this puzzle when Mr. Springer reveals his actual motive for the piece and quite possibly his religion: “the rich and powerful figured out how useful [Paul’s] theology could be, and then weaponized disagreeing with it.”

Ah, so Paul has nothing to do with any of this at all! He was a victim of a shadowy cabal and the present slander, sure, but he functions as a scapegoat for the real villain, the “ruling-class” who uses his words to maintain “power, racism, heteronormativity and patriarchy”. He’s to be blamed for allowing himself to be used by vile reactionaries, or at least, the other. Didn’t he realize that you mustn’t let your propaganda be coopted by the enemy? That you have to speak in trite platitudes and slogans so that your intention cannot be misunderstood, and your allegiance to the cause undoubtable?

All this about Paul, and the enemy who is neither Satan nor ourselves, remains to be proven, but what is known beyond a doubt at this point is that Mr. Springer lied to us about Paul. As Mr. Springer describes him, Paul sounds like a putative comrade, and if you’ll hate a comrade for being victimized by others, what feeling will you nurse for your enemies?

Another such enemy is St. Augustine who produced “the crazy and toxic idea that every human being is born already guilty”, and was “very interested in the state of your soul and very uninterested in the state of the empire.” Crazy and toxic!

Of course, Jesus is quoted in John 18 that his “kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place”, and in Matthew 10, he tells us:

do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell … So everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven, but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven.

It really seems like Jesus is concerned about “another place”, and somewhat less concerned about bodies than souls. In fact, I think he is really interested in your soul, and wants to save it if only you’ll believe in him.

Next, Mr. Springer unloads on Martin Luther who “loved Paul so much that he openly said the letters of Paul should be [sic] ‘far, far to be preferred’ over three of the four gospels—the gospels, you’ll notice, that contain most of what Jesus actually said and did.” Luther contorted Paul to get “Christians worked up about their individual standing before God and utterly silent on the question of whether the economic and political order around them bore any resemblance to the Kingdom Jesus had preached”, namely the Kingdom not of this world, and the whole thing where Jesus promises to intercede on our behalf before the Father.

Of course, Luther’s concern is to emphasize grace and justification by a hearty faith as opposed to justification by legalism and works². It is a matter of some importance that this is a chief point of contention between Catholicism, the mainlines, and evangelical Protestantism. No one has suppressed the idea of a works-based gospel; over half of Christians more or less endorse it.

As a practical matter, I am not sure that Mr. Springer should prefer justification by works given (say) his titular false accusation against Paul, and for many other reasons if he is like me. But indeed it is true that Martin Luther is not Jesus Christ, who is also neither St. Paul nor St. Augustine.

And then on cue, we turn to a citation of some Marxist Italian who discovered the banality that rulers prefer influencing culture to killing a bunch of people. Since “[y]ou don’t need soldiers to crush the peasants if you can convince the peasants that their suffering is God’s will and their reward is in heaven”, they invented Christianity. One could just as well invent critical theory, if one’s goal is simply to keep people from doing things that matter.

Contra Jesus’ own words about the importance of souls and the spiritual realm, his healing of severed enemy ears, and offering himself up to be executed for our sake, Mr. Springer claims that:

“Jesus of Nazareth preached a complete revolution. Not a metaphorical one, not just a spiritual one, but an actual overturning of the economic and political order. That message was—and still is—a direct threat to empire, wealth, and capitalism—from Roman to U.S. imperialism, from Pontius Pilate to Donald Trump. And the ruling class discovered that the most effective way to neutralize it wasn’t to fight it. It was to co-opt it. Corrupt it. Canonize it. Preach it from pulpits, funded by the same people it was supposed to threaten.”

Pontius Pilate? I mean, it’s possible that the same lord who said “render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s”, was also seeking to overthrow it. It’s also possible that we’re substituting our preferred villain for a different sect that he identified as vipers and also Satan. Whipping moneychangers and people selling sacrifical animals at temple seems kinda revolutionary?

Regardless of his political program, which is totally identical to mine, just don’t be put off by all the details like whether or not he is God:

You don’t have to believe Jesus was God to believe Jesus was right. You don’t have to accept Paul’s theology to take seriously what Jesus actually said about money and power and the people society throws away.

You might say that you don’t need Jesus to save sinners if you can convince them that their sin is the result of those greedy capitalist pigs who they can topple (or just use as an excuse for their personal failings).

And then Mr. Springer mercifully ends his piece:

So no, I still can’t stand Paul; I’d say it louder now than I said it that day in seminary. But the deeper problem was never really Paul. The deeper problem is what the ruling class did with him, and what we’ve been trained not to notice.

The only question left is whether we’re going to keep listening to the people who buried him—or whether we’re finally going to listen to him.

We never really learn from Mr. Springer just what Jesus said. We hear he said some good things about the poor, some bad things about the powerful, but what we really get are assurances that he didn’t say things that he literally did say. And we get a lot of invective about Paul, but also assurances that the problem isn’t Paul but people who misuse Paul. And also, Augustine, Martin Luther, and basically everyone.

This false gospel holds that, though you are oppressed, you can cultivate your hatred until you might hope to vanquish your enemies in the revolution. It is a gospel where justification proceeds neither by faith nor by works, but by vitriol and death.

I confess I much prefer Jesus’ gospel, where people do wicked things, are convicted by the Holy Spirit and led to repentance. They are forgiven by the Father, not for their works, but for the perfect work of Christ on the cross. They are sanctified by the spirit with his grace, and share this excellent news to others so that they may believe.

1. A blog named The Jesus Movement and intended for “people who love Jesus but are done with Christianity”. ↩︎
2. There are other alternatives including views of theosis that emphasize a dynamic relationship between faith and works, rather than strict works-righteousness. ↩︎