On Jan. 20 as President Obama addressed a nation suffering from economic crisis and waging two foreign wars, he turned to a familiar source of presidential oratory amid hardship: Paul.
“We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things,” Obama said in his inaugural address, citing Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians.
Obama’s reference to Paul was taken from his famous chapter about love, a favorite for countless weddings.
“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways,” Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 13:11.
For Obama, the “childish” reference was his way of saying that the challenges ahead must mean the end of juvenile politics. No more “conflict and discord.” No more “petty grievances and false promises.”
No more “recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.”
Put another way: adult-sized problems demand adult-sized attitudes.
The first-century saint seems to be the consoler-in-chief to presidents, if their public addresses are any indication. Former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, for example, both cited Paul when speaking to a nation reeling from terrorist attacks.
“As St. Paul admonished us,” Clinton said in Oklahoma City after a bombing there killed 168 people in 1995, “let us ‘not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.’” Bush echoed those words after the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech.
Christian leaders say the Bible’s Psalms give vent to human anguish and the Book of Job frames the question of evil but it’s Paul who provides solace amid sorrow.
“We turn to Job for the questions; we turn to Paul for the answers,” said Richard Cizik, the former Washington director for the National Association of Evangelicals.
Part of the reason for Paul’s popularity, scholars say, is that he lived in turbulent times himself. And as one of Christianity’s first theologians, he provided answers to the fledgling Church about basic questions of faith, including the role of suffering.
In fact, many of Paul’s letters address communities divided over nascent practice and theology and in constant danger of persecution.
“Since they were undergoing troubles, (Paul’s letters) are appropriate for troubled times,” said Catholic intellectual and writer Gary Wills.
At a National Cathedral service three days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Evangelist Billy Graham turned to Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians, in which Paul writes of the “mystery of iniquity.”
At the same ceremony, Kirbyjon Caldwell, a Houston United Methodist minister and spiritual adviser to Bush, read a passage from Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians.
Bush himself quoted Paul in his 2002 National Day of Prayer proclamation, saying, “I encourage Americans to remember the words of St. Paul: ‘Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.’”
Elizabeth Johnson, a professor of New Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga., called Paul a “practical theologian, not just an ivory tower thinker.”
“It’s very obvious that he is relating to real human beings in the congregations in the midst of lives. He’s addressing concrete experience,” she said.
“So are the Gospels, but it’s not as easy to see that. People can read the Gospels as if they’re disembodied. With Paul, it’s very obvious that he’s addressing human experience.”
Cizik said Paul’s message resonates because he was a “hopeful theologian.”
“Paul gives us the Christian response to death: There is life thereafter,” Cizik said, “and the life that really matters only comes through death.”
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