More Than Conquerors

See Cover: What kind of man makes a good missionary? Once, a preacher who needed an assistant decided to take a chance on a middle-aged man who was bossy, opinionated and temperamental, with a strong streak of fanaticism and an unsavory past. He turned out to have picked the greatest missionary of all time.

Saul the Pharisee, now Paul the Apostle, joined Barnabas to preach and proselytize in Antioch for a small sect of Jews who called themselves Nazarenes. When he died some 15 years later, he left behind him the firm foundations of a world religion. He shaped Christianity with his thought; Augustine and the church fathers built upon his theology, and Martin Luther found in Paul's writings the key to the Reformation: justification by faith. He stamped Christianity deeply with his missionary zeal; no other religion has penetrated into the corners of the world so persistently, and so careless of the odds, always within the echo of Paul's exclamation: "Woe is unto me, if I preach not the Gospel."

From St. Francis Xavier, awaiting his lonely death on an island off the China coast in 1552, to Bishop James Walsh, suffering in a Chinese Communist jail in 1960; from young Samuel Miller, dying of fever on a ship homeward bound from Africa in 1818, to Missionary-Pilot Nathanael Saint, sinking under the spears of the Amazon's Auca Indians in 1956, brave men have looked to the great missionary to the Gentiles, himself no stranger to suffering. Paul knew the inside of jails around the Mediterranean. Before he died, almost certainly as a martyr, he was scourged five times within an inch of his life, he was beaten thrice with rods, four times he was shipwrecked (once adrift in a storm for 24 hours), once he was stoned and left for dead. He spent his ministry, he wrote, "in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness," finding himself "in perils from waters, in perils of robbers, in perils by mine own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren."

A New Day. The perils were no fewer for the countless missionaries who fol lowed Paul. Again and again the successive missionary waves were forced back --by the collapse of Rome, by the Moslem invasions of Europe, by the 18th century revolutions. Yet again and again new missionaries picked up the Cross and took it farther than it had been carried before--in the Crusades, with the expansion of the Latin empires in America, finally in the great 19th century advance of Protestant missions, when eager young ministers streamed out of U.S. seminaries, hungry to save the heathen "from Greenland's icy mountains, from India's coral strand." They accomplished mighty works, particularly in hygiene and education; many of today's new African leaders were educated at mission schools.

But Christian missions today also face greater dangers than ever--and perhaps greater opportunities (see color pages). In too many parts of the world, newly in the grip of nationalism, Christianity is known as the religion of the white man. And everywhere Moscow's own missionaries are fighting Christianity. In Red China during the past ten years, 7,000 Christian missionaries have been killed, jailed or expelled. In the face of such pressures, the attitudes of the churches have drastically changed. While most missionaries are dedicated above all to preaching the Gospel, more and more they feel that they must be specialists with useful skills to offer, in order to make themselves desirable to new and growing countries--as linguists, teachers, medical officers, agricultural technicians. Above all, missionaries, both Protestant and Roman Catholic, feel that ultimately they must go out of business and turn over their work to new native churches.

Says Bishop Stephen Bayne, the Archbishop of Canterbury's executive officer in the Anglican Communion: "The word missionary may have outlived its usefulness. It suggests a false picture of the secure, settled, stable church at home playing a Lady Bountiful role among the underprivileged, primitive people of the world. The younger churches have gifts to give --ideas, new improvisations, experimental techniques, fresh grasps of timeless moral problems."

Says Methodist Harry Haines, who superintends schools, cares for lepers, ministers to a large congregation in Kuala Lumpur: "The day of foreign missions as such is past, but a new and better day is here."

Highs & Lows. The number of Christian missionaries in the world is at an alltime high--38,606 Protestant missionaries as compared with 29,188 in 1925; 51,000 Roman Catholic missionaries as compared with 22,477 in 1925. Yet, while the Christian population of the world is growing (845 million of the 2.8 billion people in the world), in proportion to the total population, it shows a slow decline.

In AFRICA, American missionaries have concentrated their forces heavily in recent years--Protestant missionaries there have increased from 1,487 in 1925 to 6,356 today. Roman Catholic missions have been staffed primarily from Europe, now number 27,372, up from 9,669 in 1925. They have been concentrating on training a native clergy. Protestants concentrate on education, medical training and evangelism, are only beginning to set up seminaries to train native ministers; in the Congo they currently have four, compared to 9,400 secular schools. Islam is making important strides in central Africa--partly because it is not associated with colonial whites, partly because it permits polygamy (many a Christian missionary is beginning to talk about admitting polygamous families to something called "associate membership").

ASIA shows a drop of North American Protestant missionaries, under Communist and nationalist pressure, from 9,327 in 1925 to 6,919 in 1958. U.S. Roman Catholic missionaries are up from 1,305 in 1940 to 1,918 in 1958. Japan has proved one of the hardest countries to Christianize in Asia; despite an all-out effort, only .6% of the 92 million population are members of churches, split about evenly between Protestants and Catholics. LATIN AMERICA is nominally Roman Catholic, but "even by the most generous estimates," says Maryknoll Father Albert Nevins, "only about 10% can be called practicing Catholics." Out of a total population of 191 million, Latin America has only 6,131,000 Protestants, and there has been a consistent record of active persecution of Protestants in Mexico, Colombia and Bolivia. Despite these discouragements, there are 4,825 North American Protestant missionaries in Latin America.

The New Churches. In Asia and Africa, if not in Latin America, the native churches are a source of real hope to missionaries. "In essence, my job is the same as St. Paul's 1,900 years ago or my father's 70 years ago," says Presbyterian Dr. Sam Moffet in Korea. "Of course, there are differences. My father walked through valley after valley that had never heard the name of Christ. I drive down highways where I am rarely out of sight of a Christian church. And Asia's Christian churches of tomorrow will be built by Asia's own missionaries. But we Westerners will still be working with them, because the Christian mission has no national, no racial boundaries. And the Communists are all wrong when they say that the Christian church is 'invading' Asia. After all, Paul's mission was from Asia to the West. The church is just going home."

But the growing emphasis on native churches also presents crucial problems. Anglican Bishop Stephen Neill predicts that within 50 years, despite present Moslem inroads, all of tropical Africa may be Christian, but he also warns that the native churches are far from ready to deal with such an influx of new Christians.

Jobs for a Lifetime. Until the new churches can really stand on their own, much remains to be done by missionaries. Says Lutheran Wesley Sadler, who runs a literacy center in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland: "It is fallacious to say that the missionary should endeavor to work himself out of a job. Linguistic missionaries, for example, may have completed their task in a particular language area, but there are hundreds of others for them to turn their talents to. In general, the needs of the mission are great and will not be met in our lifetime nor in the lifetime of our children."

This week, Easter will be celebrated in all sorts and conditions of hardship by some 90,000 Christian missionaries who have turned cheerfully away from the cozy securities of the well-rooted churches to carry the Gospel where there is disease and disaster, blinding ignorance and binding poverty. Hardship is their choice, as it was Paul's--who once flung a sarcastic outburst on armchai-Christianity at the Corinthians:

"I think God has exhibited us apostles as the lowest of the low, like gallows-birds; for we have become a spectacle to the universe, both angels and men. We are fools for Christ's sake, while you are most prudent Christians; we are feeble while you are strong; we are in disgrace while you are honored. To this very moment we are starving, thirsty, ragged, battered tramps . . . We are like the dregs and scum of society!"-But he also said: "In all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us." The Pharisee. Paul was not raised to suffer public scourgings and jostlings in police courts. He was born (probably some ten to 15 years after Jesus) to a prominent family in a prominent city. Tarsus in Cilicia, famed for its wealth and culture, was 1,000 years old in Saul's time, had a population of about 500,000, and was one of the centers of Stoic philosophy. Un like most of the other early Christians, Paul was a city sophisticate and always remained one; where the peasant authors of the Gospels took their figures of speech from nature (fishing, sowing, threshing and shepherding), Paul made urban metaphors -- games in the stadium, business in the forum, triumphal processions through the city streets.

From his father, Paul inherited Roman citizenship, the most potent status sym bol of those days, but he was also raised as a strict Pharisee, a member of the intellectual and spiritual elite of Judaism.

According to Luke -- generally accepted as author of the Acts of the Apostles -- young Saul was sent to Jerusalem to study under the great rabbi Gamaliel. True to the Jewish tradition that a rabbi must have a trade so that he will never have to ac cept money for teaching the law of God, Saul was a tentmaker.

The Light. He storms onto the Biblical stage in the Acts of the Apostles as a hot-eyed, self-appointed persecutor of the Christian community in Jerusalem. He even appears at the stoning of Stephen, Christianity's first martyr. He "made havock of the church, entering into every house, and haling men and women committed them to prison." Then all at once, in a flash of blinding light, he became one of them.

Paul himself refers to Christianity's most-renowned conversion rather tamely, with the words: "When it pleased God ... to reveal his Son in me that I might preach him among the heathen." But Acts gives three versions, varying in detail but all including the sudden bright light and the collapse on the road to Damascus, the voice and vision of Jesus saying, "Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?" Blinded, he is led into the city, where a Christian named Ananias, advised by a vision, lays his hands on Paul, "And ... he received sight forthwith, and arose, and was baptized."

Paul's sudden conversion from persecutor to apostle of the persecuted faith has prompted New Testament scholars to some elaborate detective work and guessing games. Some believe that Paul spent most of his early career not in Jerusalem at all but in Damascus itself, hence could not have taken part in the stoning of Stephen or known Jesus. The emphasis on Jerusalem, suggests Professor John Knox of Union Theological Seminary, may have been provided by Physician Luke who may have innocently doctored both the Acts and his Gospel to present Christianity as a continuation of the mainstream of Judaism, thereby giving it protection as a recognized religion from Roman persecution. One scholar has even tried to explain Paul's early vehemence against the Christians by suggesting that Paul at one time considered himself to be the Messiah.

There is also a widespread theory that Paul was an epileptic, and that the "vision" on the road to Damascus was simply an attack of the disease. The symptoms are typical--the light, the falling, the temporary blindness. Supporters of this hypothesis point to Paul's mysterious reference (II Corinthians 12:7-9) to his suffering from a "thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan," and this significantly follows a passage in which he tells of a man (usually taken to be himself) who "was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter." This neat theory has one important drawback, however: if the illness was the source of Paul's vision, epilepsy could hardly have also been a "thorn in the flesh."

Of Men & Angels. After his dramatic conversion, Paul spent about three years in Arabia, thinking through his new faith or preaching it. When he returned to Damascus, trouble was waiting for him. The Jewish community, looking on him as a traitor, had made arrangements with the Governor of the province to have Paul arrested. His fellow Christians promptly hid him, and his enemies, knowing that he must try to escape from the city, set up a constant watch at each of the Damascus gates. There followed the first of the many escapes that make Paul's life something of a Biblical thriller. Under cover of darkness, he was smuggled into a room with a window in the city's outer wall and then let down in a basket to make his way safely to Jerusalem and his first meeting with Peter and James. Soon he returned to his home town, Tarsus, where he stayed for about a decade until Barnabas brought him to Antioch and the real beginning of his career.

Paul was about 38 then. According to a 2nd century work called The Acts of Paul and Thecla, he was "a sturdy little balding, bowlegged man, with meeting eyebrows and a somewhat hooked nose; full of grace; for sometimes he appeared like a man and sometimes he had the face of an angel." Detractors in the Corinthian church called "his bodily presence . . . weak, his speech contemptible," and Paul himself acknowledges that he is "rude in speech, yet not in knowledge." Paul's letters give the best evidence of how he must have preached (the direct quotes attributed to him in Acts were, according to the custom of the day, largely the composition of the author). Paul's style is so completely individual that scholars have no difficulty in identifying the letters bearing his name but not written by him.The words come in a rush, broken by frequent parenthetical asides, but though he was not trying to, he produced some of the most exalted passages in all Christian literature, e.g. (I Corinthians 13): "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal . . ."

Saul into Paul. The preacher who indeed spoke with the tongues of men and angels remains a marvel to modern missionaries for his tireless traveling through the whole Mediterranean world, on foot, preaching in cities and hamlets, in markets under the eyes of Roman soldiers and by the wayside before peasants and slaves. His movements are generally divided into three missionary journeys, although*actually they were not continuous trips.

On the first journey Barnabas and Paul left Antioch together to carry the Gospel to other cities of the Greek world. At Paphos, on the island of Cyprus, they were invited to preach before the Roman proconsul, Sergius Paulus, whose court magician set to heckling the two missionaries. At that, Paul turned on the man and denounced him so eloquently that Proconsul Paulus was converted, and his magician, according to Acts, went blind. After that encounter, Paul seems to have changed his name to its Roman form and become leader of the mission; the author of Acts begins to refer to Paul and Barnabas, instead of Barnabas and Saul.

At the end of this first journey, Paul returned to Jerusalem to take up an issue --seemingly technical but in fact momentous--that was to define Christianity's course for all time.

Neither Jew nor Greek. Superficially, the first Christians seemed to be a sect of Judaism. Under the leadership of James, the brother of Jesus, the community in Jerusalem waited quietly for the end of the world, worshiping and sacrificing in the Temple, observing the fast and feast days and the stringencies of the Torah. Most of their converts were Jews; as for the Gentiles, it was understood that no man could be a Christian without first being a Jew--which meant circumcision and obedience to the dietary laws.

But Paul pointed to Jesus' consistent opposition to the tyranny of the Torah ("The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath"). Faith in Christ, plus baptism, rather than rites and observances, he maintained, is all that is necessary. This teaching greatly appealed to the Gentiles, who were interested in a religion of personal salvation rather than the national salvation hoped for by Judaism. As Paul and Barnabas made more and more converts, opposition to them began to grow among the conservative Jewish Christians, who were shocked to find communities calling themselves Christian whose members were uncircumcised and ate what they liked.

On a visit to Antioch, Peter (prodded by James) withdrew from the table that Paul shared with Gentile converts. The incident, with its implication that his Gentile converts were second-class Christians, prompted one of Paul's bursts of anger. "I withstood [Peter] to the face," he writes in Galatians 2:11, "because he was to be blamed . . ."

To settle the question with the Apostles once and for all, Paul set off for Jerusalem. Whatever his arguments were, Paul represents them as completely victorious. When James, Peter and John (who, says Paul disparagingly, "seemed to be pillars") "perceived the grace that was given unto me, they gave to me and Barnabas the right hands of fellowship; that we should go unto the heathen, and they unto the circumcision."

Paul had gone a long way toward establishing that in the new faith "there is neither Jew nor Greek ... Ye are all one in Christ Jesus."

Europe Calls. On his next journeys, Paul developed his special missionary technique--traveling for the single purpose of organizing churches, then moving on when they could stand on their own, and keeping in touch with them by an exchange of letters and legates. This method, Paul's own invention, today is built into the missionary structure of Christianity.

In a new town he would always begin in the synagogue if there was one--using it as a springboard rather than as a place to convert many Jews. For the Christian doctrine that the Messiah had been executed as a criminal was, as Paul said, plain foolishness to Greeks but a special stumbling block to Jews. Paul inevitably did better among the Gentiles--until the almost inevitable blowup, usually organized by dissident Jews. Then his personal bravery was an evangelistic asset. In three successive towns in Galatia, for example, Paul and Barnabas were expelled with violence (in one Paul was nearly stoned to death), but they returned and organized churches. In Ephesus, the makers of souvenir silver models of the temple of Artemis for the tourist trade organized a spectacular riot against Paul and his fellow Christians because of their bad-for-business denunciations of idolatry.

Christianity moved west from Asia Minor to Europe after a dream in which the figure of a man appeared beside Paul's bed and cried: "Come over into Macedonia and help us!" Paul carried the Gospel across the Aegean, through Macedonia and down to Athens, where in the agora below the Acropolis he preached his most famous sermon, proclaiming "the unknown God" to whom the Athenians had erected a monument. Almost as well known is Paul's farewell to the Ephesian elders at Miletus, when they knelt weeping on the shore after he had told them, "You . . . will see my face no more."

Long-Distance Advice. Paul was not only an evangelist; he made himself responsible for the long-distance administration of the churches he had founded, and this was a staggering task at a time when every problem was a new one. The problems of the church in Corinth alone included rituals, interfaith relations, millennialism, litigation, sexual irregularity, diet, women's dress and relations between slaves and masters, Christians and pagans.

Though he did not know it, Paul's on-the-spot instructions were to set church precedents for centuries. His famed views on sex and marriage are one example: Paul had little understanding of the sacramental possibilities of marriage, but he took sex very seriously. "It is good for a man not to touch a woman," but husbands must satisfy the desires of their wives and vice versa. Divorce he forbade --even of an unbelieving partner. Widows and the unmarried would do well to "abide even as I. But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn."

One of Paul's most hotly debated instructions (Romans 13:1-4), to submit to constituted authority ("Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers"), is an injunction that has often been used and abused in politics. Paul preached no "social Gospel"; Christian slaves should not hanker for their freedom ("Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called"), since they were free in Christ, and their Christian masters in turn were Christ's servants.

To a remarkable degree Paul had the grace--especially needed by a missionary --to keep his heart in heaven and his feet firmly planted on the ground. In / Corinthians, after his wise and tolerant sermon on the diversity of spiritual gifts, after his famed passage on love and a triumphant challenge to death ("Where is thy sting?"), he ends with a matter-of-fact "Now concerning the collection . . ."

The Martyr. It was the collection for the Mother Church in Jerusalem that profoundly changed his future. In his letter to the Romans, he said he wanted nothing more than to come to Rome, but the need to defend his ministry to the Gentiles against Jewish-Christian opposition in Jerusalem made it necessary for him to carry the latest collection there himself. When he was visiting the Temple in Jerusalem, some Jews from Ephesus recognized Paul, whom they considered Judaism's arch-subversive, and at once raised an outcry that Paul had desecrated the holy place. A frenzied mob surged around him and might well have killed him, for the penalty for desecrating the Temple was death. But the Roman authorities, anxious to prevent any disturbance in this tinderbox of a colony, sent him off with an impressive armed escort (200 infantrymen, 200 spearmen and 70 cavalrymen) to the Procurator in Caesarea. Paul remained there in prison for two years, finally invoked his right as a Roman citizen to a trial in the capital. And so, after a shipwreck off Malta, the old saint arrived at Rome at last. He was in chains, but it was almost a triumphal entry; Rome's Christian community sent delegations to greet him along the Appian Way.

The Book of Acts closes with these words: "And Paul dwelt two whole years in his own hired house, and received all that came in unto him, preaching the Kingdom of God, and teaching those things which concern the Lord Jesus Christ, with all confidence, no man forbidding him." This is the last canonical word about him.

From his letters written in Rome-Philippians, Colossians, Philemon--it is known that friends and lieutenants of his missionary days gathered round him in the easy imprisonment. There is no sure record of the outcome of his trial--if he was tried at all--or of the place or manner of his death.*Most sources agree on one thing: that eventually he died a martyr's death in Rome. The earliest source--the letter from Rome to Corinth about the year 95, which is known as the First Epistle of Clement--implies that Paul and Peter were killed together, very likely during Nero's persecution of Christians after the great fire in July of 64.

Apostle of Resurrection. Paul left behind him not only the earliest written record of Christianity, but a lively Christian opposition. He has been accused by his detractors of altering the simple, love-centered religion of Jesus in his frenzy to organize new churches, of obscuring the gentle teachings of the Gospels in a cloud of murky mysticism, of supplanting the purity of the Disciples with an opportunistic zeal for converts that could lead him to say that he was "all things to all men, that I might by all means save some."

It has also been noted to his discredit that Paul's letters rarely mention the sayings or doings of Jesus. But the atmosphere among Christians in Paul's time was still electric with expectation of the second coming; what Christ had said and done was of secondary importance to what he was. Thus Paul could dismiss the earthly life of Jesus with a summary "Though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we him no more." To Paul this reality was more real, perhaps, than to the other leaders of the church, because he probably had not known Christ "after the flesh" but had known him in spirit and in his visions. His next words after that passage (II Corinthians 5:16-17) give the clue to the whole pattern of Paul's theology: "Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new."

To colonize the world for this new creation was Paul's missionary purpose--and to him, it was a race against time. Paul was not much interested in either words or works; he is the Apostle of faith and the Resurrection, upon which he does not hesitate to risk everything: "And if there be no resurrection of the dead, Then is Christ not risen: and if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain."

The Good News. The words "in Christ" are the central motif of Paul's mystical theology. They are synonymous with being a Christian, a member of the church. Being "in Christ" has been made possible by Christ's expiatory death, which has superseded all older means of man's justification and reconciliation before God. That idea, stated and restated across the centuries, remains the major message and weapon of the Christian missionary.

Like his modern successors, Paul had to thrust this idea against established power, against reason carrying a sword, against fear and hatred. He had advantages. The obscurity and humility of the roving preacher, whom the sophisticates of the day could dismiss as a crank, served both as a protection against smug enemies and as an earnest of his sincerity. His Gospel was not yet confused by the sins of rulers and the schemes of statesmen, the aridities of theologians and the terrors of schismatic wars. Inevitably, the Christians who followed after Paul lost his terrible sense of urgency--of the Kingdom about to burst upon him between the breathing of one breath and the next. And yet the Good News of man's salvation through Christ remains the most truly revolutionary force in the world. Again and again it has proved immeasurably greater than what history describes as revolutions, be they of the mind, the sword or the machine.

Among Paul's successors at their missionary labors around the earth this Easter, a new sense of urgency is abroad. As human history exposes more and more of the chains that bind mankind, Paul's call to freedom in Christ is once again aking on the bright sound of a trumpet blast. The man in Christ is the truly free man--the master of everything because ic serves, the possessor of everything be-:ause he is possessed.

For all things are yours;

Whether ... the world, or life, or death,

Or things present, or things to come;

All are yours;

And ye are Christ's;

And Christ is God's,

*British Theologian C. H. Dodd's vivid translation of / Corinthians 4:9-13. -Ephesians, Hebrews. I and II Timothy, Titus and /// Corinthians (not generally included in the New Testament canon). - Roman Catholic tradition holds that Paul was martyred near Rome at a place called Aquae Salviae, now Tre Fontane, and was buried where the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls now stands.

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