A Fresh Perspective

William Sloane Coffin, a few years before his death, wrote a wonderful book titled, Letters to a Young Doubter . At the beginning of the correspondence he asks his young friend a probing question, “Who tells you who you are?” As Chaplain at Yale for a number of years, he knew full well the power of higher education to tell students who they are.  There are powerful forces in our culture that impact and shape who we think we are. The Christian answer that I was given as a young person is that we are all sinners. Certainly that is true. I know that I am flawed and fail regularly to live up to the best ideals of humanity, or even my own best ideals. All of us are a mass of contradictions. But is that the first and foremost thing about us?  This is not what compassionate parents teach their children. Not at first. We tell them how special they are, how much they are loved and cared for, and what possibilities they have.  I find it interesting in Paul’s letter to ...

Three times in the book of Acts, Paul’s experience of his encounter with the living Christ is told. In Acts 9, Luke reports the story. In Acts 22, Luke has Paul recount his experience to an unruly temple crowd. And in Acts 26, Paul retells his experience to Festus and King Agrippa. Paul’s own brief account of his encounter with Christ is found in Galatians 1:13–17. Paul explains this experience as a revelation— “God was pleased . . . to reveal his Son to me”—and as a calling through grace “to proclaim Christ among the Gentiles.” Paul says that after this encounter he did not “confer with any human being,” nor did he go up to Jerusalem to get the endorsement of the Twelve (“those who were already apostles before me”), but went, at once, to Arabia, and then afterward to Damascus where he began proclaiming that Jesus was the Messiah. We don’t know how long he stayed in solitude in Arabia, where he was apparently sorting things out. Paul underwent a major transformation as a result of ...