Karl Rahner (1904-1984) has written: “The Christian of the future will be a mystic or he (she) will not exist at all.” Another post you might find interesting in relation to Rahner can be found here.
Theologian Ulrich Luz in a short essay, titled “Paul as Mystic”, published in 2004 asks if St. Paul is a “mystic”.
Luz, while using different language, names the apparent separation between the experiential and spiritual (“living religion”), and the oft-experienced lifelessness and irrelevancy of doctrine and theology (often popularly understood as “talking about God”). Or, to put it a different way, it is an apparent separation between the external form and practices of religion (e.g. “going to church on a Sunday) and the experiential; the felt experience of knowing one’s self as loved, accepted and ‘held’ by God; the actual ordinary and everyday experience of the transcendent, or what many would name as “God”.
This separation can also be named in people’s experience of emptiness while at the same time longing for depth, meaning, peace, wholeness, freedom, hope and who they most truly are.
After setting the scene, Luz first sketches out a definition of ‘Mysticism’ noting that while there has always been a significant interest in Paul’s theology (what he thinks and believes), there has been less interest in his “religion, his piety, and his religious experiences”. Too often the “spiritual” and the experiential were seen as independent of (and thus of a lower order) Word and sacrament.
He also reframes the question. It isn’t so much, “was St. Paul a mystic?” Rather Luz’s question centres on the ways in which an understanding of Paul’s mysticism becomes a question about the action of God in me, before it is God’s action “extra me”, i.e. outside of me. St. Paul’s transformative experience (as the foundation for his thinking and acting) ignited in his experience on the road to Damascus becomes a means through which I/we actually hold together theology and experience, and religion (narrative/tradition, sacrament, word, (radical) orthodoxy, and practices) and spirituality (experience, orthopathy, longing and becoming).
Though perhaps an even more fruitful question to ask, specifically in relation to this blog, is the question of whether Paul is a mystic is a fruitful one for thinking through new and fresh expressions of church. I think it is.
Parts 1, 3 and 4.
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