From the Harvard Divinity School
From the Harvard University Gazette
From the Harvard Crimson
From the Boston Globe
Excerpt from the last:
But as a young man, training to be a priest, I read an essay published in 1963, entitled "The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West." In it, Krister Stendahl argued that Christians - at least since Martin Luther, if not since St. Augustine - had misread the testimony of that early apostle. In this misreading, St. Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus was taken as rescue from a troubled preoccupation with sin and guilt, establishing the paradigm of Christian grace, which saves, against Mosaic Law, which condemns. Stendahl showed that St. Paul's conscience, instead of anguished, was "robust." His stance before God was overwhelmingly one of confidence, not terror. God's constant love, not God's threat, was Paul's driving force.
The "Introspective Conscience" article was a milestone, stimulating theological reconsiderations that put Krister Stendahl in rank with Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr. Instead of understanding St. Paul as one who had left his Jewishness behind because it was inadequate to save him from a damning Old Testament God, readers could see that Paul never thought of himself as abandoning his beloved Israel. Jesus, too, was only and forever a Jew. The Old Testament-New Testament polarity, like the Law-grace dichotomy, was false. By emphasizing Paul's commitment to Jewish-Gentile amity over the dominant reading of Paul as Israel's critic, Stendahl restored a Christian mode of respect for Judaism, a foundation stone on which a new Jewish-Christian reconciliation could be built. For the rest of his life, Stendahl was a prophet of that reconciliation.
