A reader recently asked me about the Apostle Paul as an “unreliable witness.”
The phrase put me in mind of the literary device of the “unreliable narrator,” a staple of modern and postmodern fiction that adds at least a frisson of anxiety to a story, if not an outright subversion of it.
My correspondent, however, had something else in view: Paul’s credibility as apostolic leader of the early church. How can someone who claims to have been to heaven and back—whether bodily or otherwise (per II Corinthians 12:1–6)—be taken seriously as a magisterial teacher of doctrine and ethics?
If a present-day preacher were to make a similar claim, what sensible person would believe it, or him?
A few biographical snippets from the lives of formidable Christian teachers came immediately to mind. Martin Luther hurling his inkpot at the devil, who sought to distract him from his work of scripture translation. Blaise Pascal—scientist and philosopher—being so overwhelmed by a mystical encounter with God that he kept a brief account of this “night of fire” sewn into his jacket. And long before either of these two, the sober-minded theologian Athanasius commending to his audience an account of devils assailing Anthony, paragon of early monasticism.
Perhaps, of course, Luther didn’t actually throw the ink. (There is considerable doubt that he did.) Perhaps the story of Anthony is allegorical. Perhaps Pascal had an uncharacteristic experience that he wisely kept literally close to his chest.
Still, my questioner’s worry about unreliability would extend beyond Paul to the apostles as a group, and in a way even more challenging to estimates of their veracity. They didn’t claim just visions, but actual earthly encounters with the resurrected Jesus.
Maybe someone gets a knock on the head, or drinks the wrong thing, or is under tremendous stress of some kind, and he sees and hears things. Troubling, but understandable. Seriously commending to a broad audience the contention that one has had conversation with a dead man raised to life, however, ups the stakes considerably.
Christians of all sorts make a less spectacular, but no less radical, claim every time they talk about praying. The Christian belief is that prayer is nothing less than actual verbal address to the Supreme Being, who then responds in some way so as to guard, guide, and provide for that person.
Christianity, it appears, is unavoidably mysterious. Supernatural. Truly miraculous. Attempting (as many have) to reduce the Christian religion to a particular set of fond assumptions (“the universe is friendly”) and ethical ideals (“be kind”) is to reduce it to banality. The heart of Christianity is Christ, and Christ is supposed to have saved the world by his suffering and death, demonstrated eternal life to the world by his resurrection, taken his place as ruler of the world in his ascension, and promised justice and peace to the world by his imminent return. Nothing in that list is anything short of stupendous.
Meanwhile, Christians are supposed to be able to commune with him and his Father through conversation via the Holy Spirit of God dwelling in each believer. That Holy Spirit, moreover, regularly—I daresay routinely—transforms the world: heals wounds, sanctifies souls, enables heroes, comforts victims, reconciles enemies, empowers shalom-making, and sustains hope in a glorious age to come. Every element in this list is downright miraculous.
Furthermore, let's be clear that the strange experiences recorded in the New Testament are not mere freaks: weird doings that convey no significance. When one understands the Biblical story as Christians do, it actually makes sense that Jesus would come back from the dead, and that he would appear to his disciples to give them both reassurance and further teaching. It makes sense that Paul, the intellectual leader and primary missionary of the early Church, would have experiences that both expanded and confirmed his understanding of God. It makes sense that someone (in this case, John) would receive an extensive vision of heaven and of the world to come that would give hope and direction to the Christian church in his day and ever since.
Now, if you’re convinced that certain things just can’t happen, then of course you’ll doubt the credibility, if not the credulity, if not the sanity, of someone who claims firsthand experience of those things. Our general cultural familiarity with Christianity should not dull us to the extraordinary claims at its heart. And people who base their lives on such claims do deserve critical scrutiny as possibly being unreliable, even unhinged.
The world remains, however, a mysterious place—not so much “X-files” mysterious (although there are plenty of unresolved cases of that sort, from UFOs to out-of-body experiences), as “quantum theory” mysterious. The world is also politically mysterious, as you may have noticed, and psychologically mysterious, and romantically mysterious. Why do things happen as they do?
The world is even ethically and religiously mysterious: Why do people, and lots of them, act altruistically against all evolutionary advantage? Why have most people throughout history and across the globe believed in an invisible and generally undetectable Supreme Being?
It is possible—in fact, it is certain—that “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
The intelligent response to all this strangeness isn’t credulity, to be sure, but curious rationality. If my friend, a nuclear physicist, wants me to believe in the existence of electrons and tells me he can’t show them to me, I’m grateful for him at least to take me to Fermilab, outside Chicago, and show me their trails in a bubble chamber. “See? There’s evidence they’re leaving behind.”
Christians ask each other searching questions. If someone nowadays were to claim a vision or other supernatural experience, the Church should test that claim. One of the key tests of such a vision would be whether it coheres with what else we know of God through Scripture and the cumulative testimony of the Church over two millennia. It might well be so eccentric, or even contradictory, that sensible Christians won't take it on board as genuine. Being open doesn't mean being gullible.
If an acquaintance wants me to believe in anything apparently farfetched, then I do well to ask such basic questions as these: If there were such a thing, how would we know it? If there were such an entity, how would we responsibly conclude that it exists? If there were such an event, how would we responsibly conclude that it had happened?
Those are good questions for another day—or a book, actually, such as this one that pops into mind: Can I Believe? For today, it’s worth keeping a critically open mind even to someone who claims to have seen heaven and lived to talk about it.
Paul did. So did John. Jesus himself did, too.
But so did Muhammad. And so did Joseph Smith. Being neither Muslim nor Mormon, I draw the line here and not there or there, and for what I take to be good reasons. Where do you draw the line, and why?