Jean Khoury
Summary: When St Paul speaks of ‘my gospel’, he uses an expression that at first sight seems scandalous. There is only one Gospel, and Paul himself rejects with fierce severity any ‘different gospel’. Yet he speaks of ‘the gospel that I preach among the Gentiles’, and in the Letter to the Romans he names it outright as ‘my gospel’. What does this possessive reveal?
It is not a private alternative to the Gospel of Christ. It names the one Gospel as it has become Paul’s own through revelation, prayer, theological reflection, suffering and apostolic mission. The striking feature of Paul’s contribution to the New Testament is that, unlike the four Evangelists, his principal literary form is not a sustained narrative of the earthly ministry of Jesus. His letters present a Gospel already received and set it forth through argument, interpretation and application. His encounter is with the risen and glorified Christ, whom God was pleased to reveal ‘in me’, and his task is to understand what this encounter means for the Church and for the Gentile world.
This discloses something of fundamental importance for Christian maturity. Every Christian is called to receive the one Gospel, but reception cannot remain the passive possession of inherited formulations. Faith seeks understanding, putting into practice and understanding anew. The Gospel must penetrate the intelligence, be integrated into the whole of one’s experience, and at length be articulated in a coherent form proportioned to one’s vocation and historical situation. The responsibility becomes grave in those entrusted with leadership in the Church. A priest, bishop, theologian, spiritual director or formator cannot simply say, ‘The Gospel is there; read it.’ He must have struggled to understand it deeply enough to say, in a legitimate and responsible sense, ‘This is my Gospel.’
Such a task demands a double fidelity: fidelity to God, who gives the Gospel in its fullness, purity and demand; and fidelity to the people to whom one is sent, with their language, culture, questions and concrete circumstances. Between these two fidelities the minister is stretched, and the tension is truly cruciform. The task is therefore neither invention nor repetition. It is theological incarnation: the one Gospel becoming intellectually, spiritually and pastorally intelligible in a particular person, for a particular people, at a particular moment in history. And because the Gospel is a mystery of communion with the living Christ, this incarnation is accomplished only through the whole of the spiritual life: prayer, purification, charity and the docility of the mind to the Holy Spirit.
Introduction: The Strange Possessive
There is something remarkable in the language of St. Paul when he speaks of ‘my gospel’. The expression occurs explicitly in Romans 2:16 and 16:25, while Galatians 2:2 speaks of ‘the gospel that I preach among the Gentiles’. In the doxology that closes the Letter to the Romans the phrase is joined to the proclamation of Jesus Christ and to ‘the revelation of the mystery’ kept secret for long ages, so that the personal possessive stands in the immediate company of the most objective realities of the faith.
The expression is startling because the Gospel does not belong to Paul. It is the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and Paul is uncompromising on the point. At the opening of Galatians he writes that there is no other gospel, and that certain people are disturbing the community and wish to pervert the gospel of Christ. He goes so far as to say that even if ‘we or an angel from heaven’ should preach another gospel, that preacher is to be rejected. Yet the same Paul speaks without embarrassment of ‘my gospel’.
The contradiction is only apparent. The possessive does not mean that Paul owns a different Gospel; it means that the one Gospel has been so deeply assimilated into his apostolic consciousness that he can call it his own. It is the Gospel as received, understood, contemplated, formulated and proclaimed by Paul. In the language of spiritual theology, it is the Gospel that has passed from the order of information into the order of life, from what is known about Christ to what is known in Christ.
This is what makes Paul’s expression more than a historical curiosity. It reveals a task that remains permanently before the Church. The question is not whether there is one Gospel; there is. The question is whether that one Gospel has been so understood, assimilated and articulated in us (in each generation) that we can truly communicate it to the people entrusted to our care. Every Christian asks, in the first instance, ‘What is the Gospel?’ But for the mature Christian, and above all for the Christian leader, a second question eventually becomes unavoidable, and it is the more searching of the two: ‘What is my Gospel?’ And also: “Is my Gospel exactly conform to the Gospel’s purity and dimensions: width, depths, length, height”?
Note: When Jesus asks his disciples, “But who do you say that I am?” (Mt 16:15), it is as though he were asking each of us personally: “Who am I to you?” The question demands more than the repetition of what others say about him; it calls for a personal appropriation of Jesus. In a strikingly similar way, Paul speaks of “my Gospel” (Rom 2:16; 16:25). He is not claiming a Gospel different from that of Christ and the apostles, but expressing the extent to which the Gospel has become personally appropriated by him. In both cases, therefore, the question concerns what has happened to Christ and to his Gospel within us. Who is Jesus for me? What has his Gospel become in me? Have I merely received a Christian message, or have I allowed Christ and his Gospel to penetrate my way of thinking, judging, choosing and living? Ultimately, these are two ways of asking the same fundamental question, because Jesus and his Gospel cannot be separated. To appropriate the Gospel is to appropriate Christ, and to appropriate Christ is to allow his Gospel to become the principle of our existence. Thus, when Jesus asks, “Who do you say that I am?”, he is also asking: “Who am I to you?” And Paul’s “my Gospel” points towards the same reality: the Gospel must cease to be merely something we have received and become something that, because Christ has become our own, we have inwardly appropriated and live.
I. From the Gospel of Jesus to ‘My Gospel’
The four canonical Gospels present the Christian mystery predominantly in the form of narrative. They tell the story of Jesus Christ: his words and actions, his encounters, his Passion, death and Resurrection. Even where the Evangelists interpret these events theologically, the theological meaning remains embedded in the story, so that the reader is led to understand by following the Lord through the course of his earthly life.
The letters of Paul have a different literary form. He does not give another continuous account of the ministry of Jesus. He does not tell us what happened when the Lord walked through Galilee, how he looked or spoke to particular persons, or how the disciples lived beside him day by day. Paul’s encounter with Christ belongs to another mode of experience: he meets the risen Lord and receives the Revelation directly from Him. It is nonetheless a genuine encounter, and Paul never regards it as a lesser one. He counts himself among the witnesses of the Resurrection, and he describes the moment of his calling with an expression of remarkable intimacy: God was pleased ‘to reveal his Son in me’ (Gal 1:16). The revelation is not merely before Paul or addressed to him. It is within him. Everything he later writes is the unfolding of what was disclosed in that interior event or later revelations (“How the mystery was made known to me by revelation, as I have written briefly. When you read this, you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ.” (Ephesians 3:3–4)).
This distinction is theologically significant. Paul does not stand outside the Christian experience of the risen Christ; he stands within it. His encounter takes place after the Resurrection, Ascension and Pentecost, and his mission develops within a Church already formed around the apostolic proclamation. He is conscious of both sides of this situation. He insists that his Gospel came ‘through a revelation of Jesus Christ’ (Gal 1:12), and he also reminds the Corinthians that he handed on what he himself had received (1 Cor 15:3). Revelation and tradition are not rivals in Paul. The Christ who is revealed to him is the Christ already confessed by the Church, and the Church’s confession is what Paul’s revelation confirms and deepens.
His task is therefore profoundly interpretative. Paul asks what the Christ-event means. What does the death and Resurrection of Christ mean for justification? What does it mean for the Law, and for the relation between Jews and Gentiles? What does it mean for the life of the Church, and for the believer’s relationship with sin, grace, the flesh, the Spirit, the body and the new creation? His answer is not given principally as story. It is given as theological reasoning, in which the whole existence of the believer is brought under the light of the Cross and the Resurrection.
Galatians is particularly instructive in this respect. Paul recounts certain events, but his narrative rapidly becomes theological argument. As the NABRE’s introduction to the passage observes, Paul moves from the account of events to ‘his contention regarding justification by faith as the gospel message’, and then develops further arguments from experience and Scripture before drawing out the ethical consequences. The Gospel has entered another form. It has passed from narrative proclamation towards theological articulation, and it is precisely here that Paul’s example becomes significant for us.
II. Paul Does Not Merely Repeat the Gospel; He Thinks the Gospel
Paul’s theology is inseparable from his formation. He thinks with the categories available to him: his Jewish upbringing, his knowledge of Scripture, his rabbinic intellectual world, and the Greek-speaking culture in which he moves. Through his encounter with Christ all of these become instruments by which he attempts to grasp the mystery he has received. This is not a defect in his theology. It is the way theology happens. Revelation is divine, but its articulation is human, and the truth does not cease to be divine because it passes through the intelligence, language, culture and historical circumstance of a particular theologian.
Yet the intelligence at work in Paul is not merely natural. He tells the Corinthians that the Spirit searches even the depths of God, that we have received the Spirit who is from God so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us, and that ‘we have the mind of Christ’ (1 Cor 2:10–16). He exhorts the Romans to be transformed by the renewal of their mind (Rom 12:2), and he prays for the Ephesians that God may give them a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him (Eph 1:17). Pauline theology is therefore a work of the intellect elevated and purified by grace. The mind is not bypassed by the Spirit; it is healed, enlightened and drawn into the thinking of Christ himself.
This is why the history of Christian theology contains Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross and countless others. None of them simply repeats the words of the Gospel. Each attempts to understand it from within his or her own intellectual and spiritual circumstances, and each does so under the guidance of the same Spirit who taught Paul. The Second Vatican Council describes this movement when it teaches that the understanding of the apostolic tradition grows in the Church through the contemplation and study of believers who ponder these things in their hearts, through the intimate understanding of spiritual realities which they experience, and through the preaching of those who have received the sure charism of truth (Dei Verbum, 8) (See also: CCC 94 and CCC 2651, with CCC 93 and 95). Contemplation, study, spiritual experience and ecclesial authority work together in the growth of understanding.
The Catholic theological tradition recognises this movement explicitly. The International Theological Commission states that ‘the intellectus fidei takes various forms in the life of the Church’, and that theology in the strict sense occurs when the believer undertakes ‘to present the content of the Christian mystery in a rational and scientific way’. It then describes Catholic theology as ‘faith seeking understanding’. John Paul II likewise describes the theologian as ‘a believer who asks himself questions about his own faith’, with the aim of reaching ‘a deeper understanding of the faith itself’, and he adds that mature theological reflection is a sharing in the ‘thinking’ of Christ.
Paul is therefore no exception to the theological vocation. In an important sense he is one of its earliest and most striking models. He received. He encountered. He reflected. He interpreted. He formulated. He communicated. And in the end he could say, ‘my gospel’.
III. ‘My Gospel’ Does Not Mean Another Gospel
This point is indispensable. Paul’s ‘my gospel’ cannot mean a Gospel created by Paul, and Galatians itself forbids such a reading: ‘the gospel preached by me is not of human origin’, for it came ‘through a revelation of Jesus Christ’. There is an essential distinction between the Gospel and its personal theological appropriation. There is one Gospel, and there can be many faithful syntheses of it. There is one revelation, and there can be many legitimate ways of understanding and expressing it. There is one Christ, and there can be Augustine’s Christological vocabulary, Aquinas’s metaphysical vocabulary, Teresa’s experiential vocabulary, John’s mystical vocabulary, and today the vocabulary required to address a radically altered cultural situation. The difference lies not in the object of faith but in the mode of its theological appropriation.
The classical statement of this principle comes from Vincent of Lérins, who taught that the faith may grow in understanding, in knowledge and in wisdom, provided that it remains in the same sense and the same meaning. Development is genuine, but it is the development of a living organism and not the substitution of one thing for another. The child grows into the adult without ceasing to be the same person. In the same way, a theological synthesis that is truly faithful deepens the Gospel and does not replace it.
Paul’s ‘my gospel’ is therefore not subjective relativism. It is not ‘what Christianity means to me’, and it is not a licence to select those elements of the faith that correspond to one’s preferences. It is quite the opposite. The more seriously one says ‘my gospel’, the more seriously one must be able to answer a series of demanding questions. What Gospel is this? How do I know that it is the Gospel? Have I reached its roots? Have I preserved its fullness? Have I understood its demands? Have I allowed myself to be corrected by it?
Paul himself shows what such verification involves. Having received his Gospel by revelation, he goes up to Jerusalem and lays before the leaders the gospel that he preaches among the Gentiles, ‘lest somehow I should be running or had run in vain’ (Gal 2:2). The man who insists most strongly on the divine origin of his Gospel submits it nonetheless to the judgement of the Church. This is the pattern of every legitimate theological formulation. It is personal without being private, because it is received in the Church, tested by the Church and offered for the building up of the Church. Personal conviction, however deep, is never its own criterion. The criterion is the apostolic faith, witnessed in Scripture, handed on in Tradition and guarded by the Magisterium.
IV. ‘According to the Truth of the Gospel’
Here the second passage in Galatians becomes decisive. When Paul confronts Peter at Antioch, he says that Peter and the others were ‘not on the right road in line with the truth of the gospel’ (Gal 2:14). Other translations render the phrase as ‘not in step with the truth of the gospel’ or ‘not walking uprightly according to the truth of the gospel’. The image is extraordinarily rich. The Gospel is not merely a body of truth to be possessed intellectually. It is a road, and one must walk according to it. There is a ‘truth of the Gospel’ towards which a Christian must move continually, and a Christian can be out of step with that truth even while holding every correct proposition.
The incident at Antioch is instructive because the error is not primarily a doctrinal formula but a way of life. Peter withdraws from table fellowship with the Gentile believers, and in doing so he denies in practice what he holds in principle. For Paul, doctrine and conduct are not two departments of Christian existence. The truth of the Gospel is a truth that must be done, and a theological formulation that is not accompanied by a corresponding conversion of life has already begun to betray what it professes to explain.
This gives a decisive meaning to the work of formulating ‘my gospel’. It cannot be reduced to the production of an elegant theological synthesis. The theologian, priest or Christian leader must ask continually whether his understanding is actually moving towards the truth of the Gospel, and whether his life is moving with it. The effort is one of discernment, and it has several demands. One must penetrate beneath inherited formulas without abandoning them. One must ask difficult questions without reducing the mystery. One must enter into the depths of revelation without diluting its demands. One must allow the Gospel to challenge one’s own intellectual categories, and constantly return to the Gospel itself to ask whether one’s formulation has preserved its salt.
Spiritual theology adds that this discernment requires purification. St. John of the Cross teaches that faith is the proximate means of union with God precisely because it is dark to the natural intellect, and that the understanding must be stripped of its own modes of grasping before it can be united to the divine truth. The theologian who forms his synthesis must therefore expect to see his favourite categories broken. A formulation that has never been tested in the night of faith has not yet been tested at all. What survives that testing is not a conclusion held with complacency but a truth held with a humility that has been paid for.
This is why orthodoxy is not an external constraint laid upon theological creativity. Orthodoxy is the condition of authentic theological creativity. Without fidelity there can be novelty but not theology. Without depth there can be information but not understanding. Without assimilation there can be repetition but not living proclamation.
V. The Gospel Must Become One’s Own
At this point the phrase ‘my gospel’ acquires its full anthropological and spiritual meaning. Christian maturity requires more than the possession of correct propositions. It requires that the truth of Christ become interiorly one’s own. A person may know the Catechism and yet possess no theological synthesis. A priest may preach every Sunday and have no coherent understanding of the Gospel he preaches. A bishop may bear immense ecclesial responsibility and never have undertaken the long intellectual and spiritual labour required to formulate the faith as a whole. A theologian may know thousands of texts and remain wholly dependent upon the syntheses of other people.
Newman’s distinction between notional and real assent illuminates the difficulty. Notional assent accepts a proposition as true; real assent grasps the reality to which the proposition refers and is moved by it. The Christian leader may give the first without having reached the second, and it is the second that gives a man the power to teach with authority. St. Thomas Aquinas supplies the metaphysical basis of the distinction in his teaching on knowledge by connaturality. The gift of wisdom enables the believer to judge divine things not only by study but by a certain affinity with them, produced by charity, so that he suffers and knows the things of God (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 45, a. 2). There is a knowledge of the Gospel that is acquired by learning, and there is a knowledge of the Gospel that is received by being conformed to it. ‘My gospel’ requires both, and the second cannot be manufactured by the first.
This is also the sense of Paul’s great declarations of identity: ‘It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me’ (Gal 2:20), and ‘my little children, with whom I am again in labour until Christ is formed in you’ (Gal 4:19). The Gospel that Paul preaches is the Christ who has been formed in him, and the Christ whom he labours to form in others. The mature Christian leader must eventually be able to stand before God and before his people and say, in effect: ‘This is what I have understood the Gospel to be.’ That statement is not arrogance. It is responsibility, and the greater one’s responsibility for others, the greater the obligation to undertake this work.
Paul can say, ‘Imitate me, as I am of Christ’ (1 Cor 11:1). The imitation required is not an imitation of his external biography. The deeper imitation consists in allowing Christ to become the organising centre of one’s own existence and mission, and then allowing one’s understanding of Christ to mature sufficiently to guide others. Paul’s example thus presents a demanding question to every Christian leader, and the question does not concern books read, schools of theology joined or authors quoted. It concerns what has actually been understood and integrated. What has the leader discovered about the Gospel through prayer, Scripture, theology, suffering, ministry, culture and experience? What coherent synthesis now enables him to lead another person towards Christ?
This responsibility to formulate “my gospel” cannot be fulfilled by remaining at the surface of Christian revelation. It requires a determined effort to reach the roots of the Gospel: to seek its meaning, to penetrate its inner coherence and, above all, to discover its demands. The Word of God itself must be allowed to perform this work within us. The Letter to the Hebrews says: “For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Heb 4:12). The image is particularly powerful: the Word does not remain external to us, nor does it merely provide material for theological reflection; it penetrates to the deepest level of the person, reaching “the thoughts and intentions of the heart”. To formulate one’s Gospel faithfully therefore requires going to the bottom of the Gospel and allowing oneself to be confronted by its full truth and its concrete demands. It is not enough to know what the Gospel says; one must discover what the Gospel requires. Only then can the theologian or Christian leader responsibly articulate “my gospel”: not a reduced or selective version of the Gospel, but the Gospel in its depth, fullness and exigency, as it has been understood, received and lived in the presence of God.
VI. The Necessity of Theology
This brings us directly to the meaning of theology. The traditional expression fides quaerens intellectum is often treated as the definition of an academic discipline. It is much more profound. Faith itself seeks understanding, because love desires to know the Beloved. The International Theological Commission says that ‘the work of understanding faith contributes in turn to the nourishment of faith and enables the latter to grow’. Benedict XVI similarly describes theology as ‘the search for a rational understanding, as far as this is possible, of the mysteries of Christian Revelation, believed through faith’. Theology is thus not a departure from the life of faith but one of its proper activities, and it feeds the life of prayer that sustains it.
The Fathers of the desert understood this unity with great clarity. Evagrius of Pontus gave it a formula that became a classic of the spiritual tradition: if you are a theologian you will pray truly, and if you pray truly you are a theologian. Theology in this sense is not a technique that can be learned apart from the life of prayer, nor is prayer a purely affective exercise that can dispense with the labour of the mind. The two are one movement, in which the intelligence is led by love and love is illumined by the intelligence. A theology divorced from holiness becomes sterile, and a spirituality divorced from theology becomes sentimental and defenceless against error.
Theological maturity is therefore not an intellectual luxury. For a person entrusted with teaching, preaching, formation or pastoral leadership, the failure to undertake serious theological reflection can become a failure of responsibility. St. Teresa of Avila, who was not a professional theologian and who knew the dangers of dry learning without prayer, nevertheless sought out learned directors throughout her life, because she understood that sincere piety without sound doctrine can lead souls astray. The one who guides others in the spiritual life must understand what is happening in them, and that understanding cannot be improvised.
The people one serves do not live in Paul’s world. They do not inhabit Augustine’s world, or the thirteenth-century world of Thomas Aquinas, or Teresa’s sixteenth-century Spain, or the Carmelite world of John of the Cross. They inhabit their own world, with its own questions, wounds, idols and hopes. The Church therefore needs men and women who have so interiorised the Gospel that they can express its eternal truth in the intellectual and cultural language of their contemporaries. This is not adaptation for its own sake. It is evangelisation.
VII. The Double Fidelity
Here lies perhaps the deepest dimension of the expression ‘my gospel’. The person who formulates the Gospel for a particular people is placed between two fidelities.
The first is fidelity to God. This means fidelity to revelation, to Christ, to the fullness of the Gospel and to the truth of the faith. The theologian cannot sacrifice truth in order to become relevant. He cannot remove what is difficult because contemporary culture finds it uncomfortable, and he cannot diminish the demands of the Gospel in order to make it more attractive. The Gospel is not his to edit, and the one who edits it ceases to be its servant.
The second is fidelity to the people. God did not entrust the Gospel to the Church so that it might be preserved in an inaccessible form. He sent the Church into the world, and the Gospel is for these people, here and now. The minister must therefore understand them. He must know their language and their intellectual categories, recognise their questions, and discern what they fear, what they desire, what they misunderstand and what prevents them from hearing. The model is the Incarnation itself. The Council teaches that the words of God, expressed in human language, have been made like human discourse, just as the Word of the eternal Father took to himself the flesh of human weakness and became like men (Dei Verbum, 13). The Word does not remain at a distance from human speech. He enters it, and is not diminished by doing so.
Paul expresses something of this apostolic flexibility when he writes: ‘I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some’ (1 Cor 9:22). This does not mean abandoning truth. Classical interpretation rightly understands Paul’s accommodation as an approach to different persons without compromise of his own convictions. He adapts the form of his approach in order to serve the unchanging substance of his message, and he does so in the same breath in which he declares that he does everything for the sake of the Gospel.
The apostolic task is therefore suspended between two poles. Fidelity to God prevents the Gospel from becoming accommodation, and fidelity to people prevents the Gospel from becoming abstraction. The two fidelities belong together, and they cannot be separated without destroying both. A Gospel preserved without being communicated is not faithful to God, who wills to be known; a Gospel communicated without being preserved is not faithful to men, who are owed the truth.
VIII. The Cruciform Nature of Apostolic Theology
This double fidelity explains why genuine apostolic theology is crucifying. The minister stands between what must not be changed and those who desperately need it to be expressed in a form they can understand. On one side stands the unchanging Gospel; on the other stands the changing world. The temptation is always to resolve the tension by abandoning one side. One may become so anxious for fidelity to tradition that one ceases to speak meaningfully to contemporary people, or so anxious for relevance that one gradually alters the Gospel itself. Neither is authentic apostolicity.
The Cross offers another model. Christ is himself the mediator, the one in whom God and humanity are united, and he accomplishes this union with arms stretched between heaven and earth. The apostolic person participates in this mediation. He remains stretched between God and humanity, carrying the Gospel without diluting it and carrying the people without abandoning them. Paul knows this and says so plainly. He resolves to know nothing among the Corinthians except Jesus Christ and him crucified (1 Cor 2:2). He carries the treasure in earthen vessels, always bearing in his body the dying of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may be manifested (2 Cor 4:7–12). He rejoices in his sufferings for the sake of the Church, filling up in his flesh what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ (Col 1:24). His theology is not written from a position of safety.
This is why ‘my gospel’ is not simply a possessive expression. Properly understood, it is a cruciform expression. It means: this is the Gospel that I have received from God, penetrated as deeply as I can, struggled to understand, tested against the truth, allowed to transform me, and for which I have now assumed responsibility before these people. It carries within it the paternity of which Paul speaks when he says that he became the father of the Corinthians through the Gospel (1 Cor 4:15). A father does not merely transmit information. He gives life, and he pays for it. That is why the task takes years, and why it may take decades.
IX. From Reception to Formulation
There is a progression here that deserves to be made explicit. First the Gospel is received. Then it is believed, and then lived. Then it is questioned, and then contemplated. Then it is intellectually organised and tested against the whole of revelation. Then it is expressed, and finally it becomes capable of being handed on. Each stage is a work of grace and also a work of the human person, and none can be skipped. The tradition of lectio divina maps the same ascent in another language: reading while listening and putting into practise Jesus’ Word (contemplation), in which the Word first received by the eye and the mind is gradually received by the heart and becomes the form of the life.
The pattern is visible in Paul’s own biography. After his call he does not hurry to formulate. He goes into Arabia, returns to Damascus, and only after three years goes up to Jerusalem (Gal 1:17–18). Fourteen years pass before he lays his Gospel before the leaders of the Church (Gal 2:1). These are years of silence, labour and obscurity, in which the revelation received in a moment is slowly assimilated by a mind and heart that must grow into its meaning. Genuine theological synthesis cannot be produced in two days. It requires time because it requires integration, and integration is the slow work of grace and fidelity.
The great syntheses of the tradition confirm this. The synthesis of Thomas Aquinas is not the accumulation of theological information. Augustine’s corpus is not a collection of answers. Teresa and John of the Cross do not merely comment on Christianity. Each of them, in a personal manner, articulates the Christian mystery as a coherent whole, and each does so after years of prayer, labour and trial. Their formulations are personal without being private. They are historically conditioned without being historically imprisoned. They speak in the language of their time without reducing the Gospel to that language. Even the end of the greatest of them bears the same mark: Thomas’s earliest biographers report that, after an experience of prayer in the last months of his life, he laid down his pen, saying that everything he had written seemed to him as straw. The synthesis serves the mystery and does not exhaust it, and the one who has laboured most to formulate it is the one who knows this best.
This is what it means for the Gospel to become incarnate in theological intelligence. It is not a technical achievement but a spiritual maturation, in which the one Word, received in faith, takes flesh a second time in the mind, the language and the life of a particular disciple.
X. The Leader’s Obligation
The implications for ecclesial leadership are considerable. A Christian leader should not be satisfied with having received the faith; he must understand it. He should not be content to repeat inherited formulas; he must understand why those formulas matter and what mystery they express. He should not merely transmit conclusions; he must be able to lead others through the reasoning that connects those conclusions to Christ. And he should not merely know what the Church teaches; he must have struggled to grasp the inner coherence of what the Church teaches.
This is especially important for priests, bishops, spiritual formators and theologians, whose ministry requires them to interpret the Gospel for others. The spiritual director in particular is called to discern the action of grace in a soul, to distinguish the movements of the Holy Spirit from the illusions of the enemy and the distortions of nature, and to lead a person through the stages of purification, illumination and union. He cannot do this without a doctrine of grace, a theology of prayer, an understanding of sin and a vision of holiness that he has made his own. His theological formation cannot therefore be merely informational. It must lead towards synthesis.
The question eventually becomes unavoidable. What is the Gospel as I have come to understand it? How does it illuminate the human person, and how does it explain holiness? How does it understand sin and grace, and how does it interpret suffering? How does it explain prayer, the Church and the person of Christ? How does it answer the deepest questions of the people whom I have been sent to serve? When these questions have been pursued seriously over many years, something begins to emerge. One begins to possess a theology, and a synthesis. One begins, in the Pauline sense, to possess ‘my gospel’.
Theoretical Consequences
The first theoretical consequence is that theology cannot be reduced to the repetition of revealed propositions. Revelation is given once and for all, but its understanding develops within the Church. Theology is the disciplined process by which faith seeks an ever deeper understanding of what it has received, and that process is at once intellectual and spiritual, since it is carried out by a believer who prays, is purified and loves.
The second consequence is that theological plurality need not imply doctrinal relativism. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross can speak differently because the Gospel is greater than any single conceptual system. The existence of several faithful theological syntheses is not evidence that there is no truth. It is evidence that the truth is inexhaustible, because it is a Person, and no finite mind or language can encompass him.
The third consequence is that theological language is necessarily historical. Paul himself demonstrates this. His theological vocabulary emerges from the encounter between revelation and his particular intellectual formation. A Christian leader today therefore cannot simply reproduce Paul’s conceptual categories and imagine that he has thereby fulfilled Paul’s mission. To imitate Paul may mean precisely to do what Paul did: to think the one Gospel through the intellectual categories of one’s own time.
The fourth consequence is that orthodoxy and contextualisation are not opposites (it is a long journey though!). The true opposition is between faithful contextualisation and distortion. The more seriously one seeks to express the Gospel in a new cultural context, the more seriously one must know the Gospel itself, and the more rigorously one must submit one’s formulation to the judgement of Scripture, Tradition and the Church.
The fifth consequence is that theology has a missionary structure. Theology is not merely the contemplation of truth for its own sake. The truth that is contemplated must become communicable, because love does not keep to itself what it has received. The theological task therefore contains within itself an apostolic dimension, and the contemplative and the missionary are united in it, as they were united in Paul, whose most profound reflections were composed in the midst of travel, controversy and pastoral anxiety.
Practical Consequences
The chief practical consequence is that Christian formation must eventually move from information to synthesis. A seminarian should not merely complete courses in Scripture, dogma, moral theology and spirituality. He should eventually be able to explain how these dimensions belong together and how they converge in the person of Christ and the life of grace. A formation that leaves the disciplines in separate compartments has not yet formed a theologian, and still less a shepherd.
A priest should not merely prepare homilies. Over the years his preaching should progressively reveal an integrated understanding of the Gospel, so that those who listen to him for a decade receive not a series of disconnected reflections but the gradual unfolding of a coherent vision. A bishop should not merely administer a diocese. His pastoral decisions should arise from a coherent vision of Christ, the Church, holiness and the human person, so that his government is the practical form of his theology. A spiritual formator should not merely transmit methods. He should have developed an understanding of spiritual growth deep enough to recognise what is happening in the people entrusted to him. A theologian should not merely produce specialised studies. Specialisation should eventually contribute to a larger synthesis, and the theologian who never attempts it has declined part of his vocation.
Every Christian leader should therefore return periodically to the fundamental question: ‘What is my Gospel?’ The answer should not be a slogan. It should be the fruit of years of prayer, Scripture, study, theological reflection, pastoral experience, suffering, purification and encounter with Christ. It should be capable of being written, taught and preached, and capable of guiding people. It should be offered for examination to others who are competent to judge it, as Paul laid his Gospel before the leaders in Jerusalem. And it should remain permanently open to correction by the fullness of revelation.
Conclusion: ‘My Gospel’
Paul’s expression ‘my gospel’ can therefore be read as far more than a statement about apostolic authorship. It reveals a movement that belongs to mature Christian existence. The Gospel is first received from Christ and the Church. It is then interiorised. It must be thought and understood; it must penetrate the intelligence and be integrated with the whole of one’s existence. It must eventually be formulated in a coherent manner and communicated to the people whom God places before us. For Paul, this process produced a theological articulation of the Gospel shaped by his encounter with the risen Christ, his Jewish and rabbinic formation, his knowledge of Scripture and his mission to the Gentiles. His expression ‘my gospel’ names the Gospel as it has become intellectually and apostolically his own.
This does not create another Gospel. It makes the one Gospel communicable. And this is why Paul’s example remains so challenging. We have not been asked merely to preserve the Gospel; we have been asked to receive it so deeply that we can give it. We have not been asked merely to repeat the faith; we have been asked to understand it. We have not been asked merely to tell people to ‘read the Gospel’; we have been given the responsibility of helping the Gospel reach them. That requires a double fidelity, to God and to those to whom God sends us. The first guards the truth of the Gospel, and the second demands that this truth become intelligible to real human beings in a real historical situation. Between these two fidelities stands the Christian leader, and this is why the task is cruciform.
To say ‘my gospel’ is therefore to accept responsibility. It means: this is the one Gospel that I have received; this is the Gospel I have struggled to understand; this is the Gospel that has judged me, transformed me and become mine; and this is the Gospel that, in fidelity to God and to the people entrusted to me, I am now responsible for communicating. In that sense ‘my gospel’ is not an option. It is the mature form of receiving the Gospel.
Perhaps this is one of the great lessons hidden in the uniqueness of St. Paul. The Church does not give us Paul merely so that we may read what he wrote. She gives us Paul also so that we may learn how a human being, seized by Christ, can take the one Gospel so seriously that he spends his life thinking it, living it, articulating it and giving it to his own generation. Paul could say ‘my gospel’. The question for us is whether, after years of following Christ, we can truthfully say the same: not because we have another Gospel, but because the one Gospel has finally become our own.
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Bibliography
The principal biblical sources are Galatians 1–2 and 4:19; Romans 2:16, 12:2 and 16:25; 1 Corinthians 2:2, 2:10–16, 4:15, 9:19–27, 11:1 and 15:3; 2 Corinthians 4:7–12; Colossians 1:24; and Ephesians 1:17. Particularly important are Galatians 1:11–12, where Paul insists that his Gospel came ‘through a revelation of Jesus Christ’; Galatians 1:16, where God is pleased to reveal his Son ‘in me’; Galatians 2:2, where he speaks of ‘the gospel that I preach among the Gentiles’ and submits it to the leaders in Jerusalem; and Galatians 2:14, where he speaks of walking ‘in line with the truth of the gospel’.
International Theological Commission, Theology Today: Perspectives, Principles and Criteria (2011), especially §§17–19, on the intellectus fidei, theology as ‘faith seeking understanding’, and theology as the rational and systematic understanding of the Christian mystery.
Second Vatican Council, Dei Verbum (1965), especially §8, on the growth of understanding in the Church through contemplation, study, spiritual experience and the preaching of the successors of the apostles, and §13, on the condescension of the divine Word in human language.
John Paul II, Pastores Dabo Vobis (1992), especially the section on theological formation, where the theologian is described as ‘a believer who asks himself questions about his own faith’ and theological reflection as a participation in the ‘thinking’ of Christ.
John Paul II, Fides et Ratio (1998), especially the Introduction and §§73–74, concerning the relationship between faith and reason and the necessity of the intellectual search for truth. John Paul II’s famous formulation is that ‘Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth’.
Benedict XVI, General Audience, 28 October 2009, on monastic and scholastic theology, particularly the understanding of theology as fides quaerens intellectum and the relationship between faith, reason, love and the search for truth.
Benedict XVI, General Audience, 21 November 2012, on faith and reason, particularly his presentation of St Augustine’s ‘I believe, in order to understand, and I understand the better to believe’ and his discussion of Anselm’s fides quaerens intellectum.
St Augustine, Sermon 43, especially the traditional formulation of the relationship between believing and understanding.
St Anselm of Canterbury, Proslogion, especially the methodological principle traditionally expressed as fides quaerens intellectum.
St Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium, especially chapter 23, on the growth of doctrine in the same sense and the same meaning.
Evagrius of Pontus, On Prayer, especially the saying on the identity of the theologian and the one who prays truly.
St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (especially II-II, q. 45, a. 2, on the gift of wisdom and knowledge by connaturality) and Summa contra Gentiles, as major examples of the attempt to articulate the coherence of Christian revelation through a comprehensive theological synthesis.
St Teresa of Avila, The Book of Her Life, The Way of Perfection and The Interior Castle, as examples of the theological appropriation of the Gospel through the language of lived spiritual experience.
St John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel, The Dark Night, The Spiritual Canticle and The Living Flame of Love, as an example of a comprehensive theological articulation of the Gospel through the language of mystical experience and spiritual transformation.
John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870), on notional and real assent.