Conversion, Contradiction, and Creativity

Today I'd like to talk about a unique individual from the New Testament first known as Saul, and after his conversion, was known as Paul

Based on what we know, Paul’s voice and style can best be described as urgent, argumentative, and full of rhetorical questions and paradoxes. Compared to Moses and David, he’s much less about stories and much more about persuasion.

Genres he influenced: his letters basically create Christian epistolary literature, setting a pattern that has influenced writers from Augustine to Kierkegaard.
  ats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked letters from him to the synagogues of Damascus, so that if he found any who were of the Way, whether men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. As he journeyed he came near Damascus, and suddenly a light shone around him from heaven. Then he fell to the ground, and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?”

Transcript

Today I'd like to talk about a unique individual from the New Testament first known as Saul, and after his conversion, was known as Paul

Based on what we know, Paul’s voice and style can best be described as urgent, argumentative, and full of rhetorical questions and paradoxes. Compared to Moses and David, he’s much less about stories and much more about persuasion.

Genres he influenced: his letters basically create Christian epistolary literature, setting a pattern that has influenced writers from Augustine to Kierkegaard.
  ats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked letters from him to the synagogues of Damascus, so that if he found any who were of the Way, whether men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. As he journeyed he came near Damascus, and suddenly a light shone around him from heaven. Then he fell to the ground, and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?”

And he said, “Who are You, Lord?”

Then the Lord said, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.

So he, trembling and astonished, said, “Lord, what do You want me to do?”

Then the Lord said to him, “Arise and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do.”

And the men who journeyed with him stood speechless, hearing a voice but seeing no one. Then Saul arose from the ground, and when his eyes were opened he saw no one. But they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus. And he was three days without sight, and neither ate nor drank.
Now there was a certain disciple at Damascus named Ananias; and to him the Lord said in a vision, “Ananias.”

And he said, “Here I am, Lord.”

So the Lord said to him, “Arise and go to the street called Straight, and inquire at the house of Judas for one called Saul of Tarsus, for behold, he is praying. And in a vision he has seen a man named Ananias coming in and putting his hand on him, so that he might receive his sight.”

Then Ananias answered, “Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much harm he has done to Your saints in Jerusalem. And here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all who call on Your name.”

But the Lord said to him, “Go, for he is a chosen vessel of Mine to bear My name before Gentiles, kings, and the children of Israel. For I will show him how many things he must suffer for My name’s sake.”

And Ananias went his way and entered the house; and laying his hands on him he said, “Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on the road as you came, has sent me that you may receive your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” Immediately there fell from his eyes something like scales, and he received his sight at once; and he arose and was baptized.

So when he had received food, he was strengthened. Then Saul spent some days with the disciples at Damascus.

Immediately Saul preached the Christ in the synagogues, that He is the Son of God. Then all who heard were amazed, and said, “Is this not he who destroyed those who called on this name in Jerusalem, and has come here for that purpose, so that he might bring them bound to the chief priests?”
But Saul increased all the more in strength, and confounded the Jews who dwelt in Damascus, proving that this Jesus is the Christ.

Now after many days were past, the Jews plotted to kill him. But their plot became known to Saul. And they watched the gates day and night, to kill him. Then the disciples took him by night and let him down through the wall in a large basket.

The story is even retold three times in Acts.

Now it is important to remember that when we turn to Paul, we enter a completely different kind of literary world from Moses or David. Moses gives us law and narrative, David gives us lyric poetry and story, but Paul is something else entirely: he is the letter writer, the controversialist, the thinker who invents a new genre almost by accident.

The letters of Paul — terse, sprawling, argumentative, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes almost incoherent — and they have shaped Western literature as much as Homer, Dante, or Shakespeare. And what’s most striking is that Paul was not, in any sense, trying to be a “literary” figure. He was writing in haste, often from prison, sometimes dictating to secretaries. His words are full of urgency. He wrote because he had to — because he believed the end of the world was coming soon, and because his fledgling communities needed guidance right now.

And yet, out of that urgency, he created something utterly new.

Paul’s style is unmistakable. He begins sentences that never quite end, piling up clauses until they collapse under their own weight. He loves paradoxes — “when I am weak, then I am strong.” He peppers his arguments with rhetorical questions: Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! He can shift from theology to personal anecdote in a heartbeat, reminding his readers that he once persecuted Christians, that he has been beaten, shipwrecked, imprisoned.

It’s as though you’re reading someone both thinking and speaking at once, barely able to keep up with himself. Some scholars have called him “the apostle of digression.” Others, less charitably, have accused him of logical messiness. But that very messiness is part of what makes his writing so alive.

We often forget that the Christian New Testament is dominated not by gospels, not by narrative, but by letters. Paul’s epistles are the oldest Christian documents we have — older even than the gospels themselves. Without intending to, Paul elevated the letter into a world-shaping genre.

A private letter became a sacred text. A local dispute became theology. An urgent pastoral word to a small group of believers in Corinth or Galatia became part of the world’s literary canon. It’s as if one day your emails are suddenly being read aloud in cathedrals.

And from Paul’s model flows a whole tradition: Augustine’s Confessions are soaked in Pauline echoes. Luther read Paul’s words on justification and launched a Reformation. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky — all of them wrestled with Paul’s paradoxes of faith and reason. Even Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” feels Pauline in its mix of urgency, moral argument, and personal appeal.

If David gave us the archetypal sinner-king, Paul gave us the archetypal conversion story. The Damascus road — light from heaven, a voice crying “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?” — is not just an episode in Acts. It is the template for countless autobiographical moments in literature. Augustine in the garden, Bunyan in Grace Abounding, Tolstoy in his midlife despair — all borrow, consciously or unconsciously, from Paul’s drama of reversal.

Notice, too, that Paul himself tells his story multiple times, with slightly different emphases. He becomes his own biographer, shaping and reshaping the moment that defines him. The literary lesson is clear: the power of retelling lies not in consistency but in intensity.

Paul is also a writer of tensions. Again and again, he circles the question of law and grace, freedom and obedience. “The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” His prose is full of opposites that demand resolution but never quite resolve.

This is why he fascinated later writers who loved paradox. Kierkegaard read Paul and saw in him the seeds of existential faith. Nietzsche read Paul and despised him, calling him the corrupter of Christianity, yet even Nietzsche’s thunder sounds oddly Pauline in its urgency.

Paul does not argue like a philosopher; he argues like someone writing with fire at his back. The contradictions are not mistakes but the very fabric of his thought.

To a modern audience, Paul can sound harsh, dogmatic, even alien. But if you listen for his literary voice, you hear something closer to a jazz improvisation — riffs on themes of faith, grace, weakness, strength, death, and life. His metaphors are homely but powerful: a body with many members, a race to be run, a prize to be won. These images have entered the bloodstream of literature.

And there’s something almost startlingly modern in his candor. He admits to feeling torn, anxious, even depressed: “We were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself.” That’s not the voice of a marble saint — it’s the voice of a writer who is painfully, vividly human.

If Moses gave us the law, and David gave us the psalm, Paul gave us the letter — the personal, urgent, argumentative form that would carry not just Christianity but centuries of literary development.

And whether you admire him or recoil from him, you cannot escape him. His sentences wind through Augustine and Luther, echo in Bunyan and Milton, reverberate in Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard. Even the cadences of modern speech owe something to his relentless rhythms.

Paul is not “literary” in the way of poets or storytellers. He is literary in the way of a man whose words, written under pressure, became the scaffolding of thought itself.

You see, when we move from Moses and David to Paul, we feel a shock — almost as though the Bible has suddenly shifted genres. Moses gives us the law and the sweeping narrative of origins. David gives us lyric poetry and the drama of a flawed king. But Paul? Paul bursts onto the page as something utterly new: a voice in a letter, speaking across miles, across centuries, in sentences so jagged and alive that they still leap off the page today.

Paul is not “literary” in the conventional sense. He was not trying to write great art. He was not writing poetry or history. He wrote because he had to: because a community in Corinth was falling apart, or because a church in Galatia was slipping into legalism, or because he himself sat in chains and needed to reach his friends. His writings are improvisational, urgent, often dictated in haste to a secretary. And yet, out of that urgency, he invented one of the most influential literary forms of all time: the epistle.

Paul’s style is unforgettable. Even in English, the King James translators preserved the feel of his racing, tumbling thought. He piles clause upon clause, as though unable to stop. Listen to this from Romans 8, where he crescendos into one of the most soaring passages in all of literature:

“For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers,
nor things present, nor things to come,
nor height, nor depth,
nor any other creature,
shall be able to separate us from the love of God,
which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

This is not tidy prose. It is litany, incantation, a rolling wave of rhetoric. Paul builds and builds until the only way to end is with a crash of certainty: nothing can separate us.

Compare that to his candor in 2 Corinthians 11, where he catalogs his sufferings in a grim passage.

“Of the Jews five times received I forty stripes save one.
Thrice was I beaten with rods, once was I stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck,
a night and a day I have been in the deep;
In journeyings often, in perils of 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.”

It’s worth pausing to notice what’s happening here. Paul is writing letters. Not epics, not psalms, not laws — letters. And yet those letters become scripture. A note dashed off to a tiny house-church in Philippi ends up being chanted in medieval cathedrals, printed in Gutenberg’s Bible, and read at funerals today.
The transformation of the letter into sacred text is one of the great literary shifts in history. It is as if your private email to a friend were canonized and recited centuries later.

And the form sticks. Augustine’s Confessions echo Paul’s self-analysis. As mentioned before, Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail deliberately places itself in the Pauline tradition — a voice crying out from chains, appealing to conscience through urgent prose. Even Oscar Wilde, writing his De Profundis from prison, sounds uncannily Pauline in his mixture of bitterness, confession, and hope.

Every autobiography has a turning point, and Paul gives us perhaps the most famous in all of Western writing: the Damascus road. Three times in Acts, the story is told — with small variations each time, almost as if Paul himself keeps reshaping the narrative.

“And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus:
and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven:
And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him,
Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?
And he said, Who art thou, Lord?
And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest:

This is the template of the modern “conversion scene.” Augustine’s vision in the garden. John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding. Tolstoy’s midlife crisis. Even contemporary memoirs of addiction and recovery often use the Damascus Road pattern: the sudden collapse, the voice from outside, the moment of radical reversal.

Paul, in telling and retelling this scene, essentially invents the literary genre of conversion narrative.

Paul’s letters are full of tensions that never quite resolve, and this is part of their literary power. Again and again, he turns over the paradox of law and grace, sin and freedom, death and life.

Romans 7 (KJV) captures the agony of contradiction:

“For the good that I would I do not:
but the evil which I would not, that I do.

Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.
O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?”

This is literature at its most raw: the confession of divided will. And generations of writers have drawn on it. Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov is practically living inside Romans 7. Kierkegaard saw here the existential struggle of faith. Even Freud, in describing the unconscious, echoes the Pauline sense of an inner battle beyond our control.

Paul’s imagination is full of metaphors drawn from ordinary life. He speaks of the body and its members:

“For as the body is one, and hath many members,
and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body:
so also is Christ.” (1 Corinthians 12:12)

He compares faith to running a race:

“Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize?
So run, that ye may obtain.” (1 Corinthians 9:24)

He imagines death itself as swallowed up by victory:

“O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” (1 Corinthians 15:55)

These images — of limbs, races, stings, prizes — become metaphysical truths. They are memorable because they are simple. Like Shakespeare, Paul can take ordinary words and load them with eternity.

And there’s something almost startlingly modern in his candor. He admits to feeling torn, anxious, even depressed: “We were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself.” That’s not the voice of a marble saint — it’s the voice of a writer who is painfully, vividly human.

If Moses gave us the law, and David gave us the psalm, Paul gave us the letter — the personal, urgent, argumentative form that would carry not just Christianity but centuries of literary development. He is the prototype of the prison writer.

And whether you admire him or recoil from him, you cannot escape him. Even the cadences of modern speech owe something to his relentless rhythms. Paul is not “literary” in the way of poets or storytellers. He is literary in the way of a man whose words, written under pressure, became the scaffolding of thought itself.

Paul’s style is unforgettable. Even in English, the King James translators preserved the feel of his racing, tumbling thought. He piles clause upon clause, as though unable to stop. Listen to this passage from Romans 8, where he crescendos into one of the most soaring passages in all of literature:

“For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers,
nor things present, nor things to come,
nor height, nor depth,
nor any other creature,
shall be able to separate us from the love of God,
which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

This is not tidy prose. It is litany, incantation, a rolling wave of rhetoric. Paul builds and builds until the only way to end is with a crash of certainty: nothing can separate us.

Join celebrate creativity as we leave the rhetoric of Paul for the magnificent pros of Dante. And thank you for listening to celebrate creativity.