Paul and the Peril of Second-Hand Faith: Desire, Doctrine, and the Lost Human Thread

The Pauline legacy stands as one of the most influential — and most contested — foundations of Christian theology. A prolific letter-writer, moral philosopher, apocalyptic visionary, and church-builder, Paul of Tarsus shaped not only the structure of early Christianity but also its assumptions about authority, sexuality, sin, and salvation. And yet, for all his canonical weight, Paul remains a deeply paradoxical figure: a man who never met Jesus in life, who claimed authority through a private revelation, and whose writings continue to provoke questions about authenticity, context, and the limits of moral universality.
Paul never walked the shores of Galilee. His knowledge of Jesus is entirely second-hand, filtered through an ecstatic vision on the road to Damascus and his engagement with the emerging Jesus movement. Unlike Peter, James, or Mary Magdalene — who experienced Jesus as rabbi, friend, and resurrected presence — Paul’s Jesus is a cosmic Christ, defined more by theology than by memory. Indeed, his letters make almost no reference to Jesus’ parables, actions, or personality. Instead, Paul speaks of Christ in exalted metaphysical terms: as the new Adam, the pre-existent Logos, the reconciler of Jew and Gentile, the head of the Church. This theological construct becomes the lens through which Paul addresses questions of law, desire, purity, and grace — often in ways that diverge from Jesus’ lived and embodied teachings.
Nowhere is this divergence more apparent than in the question of sexual ethics. In 1 Corinthians 6 and Galatians 5, Paul warns believers to flee porneia — a Greek term broadly translated as "sexual immorality." But what does Paul actually mean? Too often, porneia has been retrofitted by later ecclesiastical authorities to mean any sex outside heterosexual marriage. Yet in its first-century context, porneia likely referred to a wide range of exploitative or dishonourable practices: ritual prostitution, abusive power dynamics, and relationships rooted in hierarchy rather than love.
The Greco-Roman world in which Paul preached was saturated with cultural practices that were ethically problematic, especially when measured against the core Christian commandment to “love your neighbour as yourself.” Roman households normalised the sexual use of slaves. Civic festivals included cultic sex rites. Public entertainment glorified domination and humiliation. In this world, Paul’s prohibitions make sense not as puritanical repression, but as a radical reorientation of community values. His sexual ethics were, arguably, not about repressing desire, but about transforming relationships of power and possession into relationships of mutuality and dignity.
However, when Paul's culturally embedded instructions are stripped of context and elevated to eternal moral law, they become highly vulnerable to abuse. His letters have been weaponised to justify the marginalisation of women, queer persons, divorced individuals, and anyone whose embodiment of love does not fit rigid heteronormative templates. In such hands, Paul ceases to be a reformer and becomes a tool for control — not liberation. This is the real danger: not Paul's original intent, but how his voice has been instrumentalised to prop up institutions more concerned with power than with love.
Jesus, by contrast, rarely speaks in abstractions. His moral vision centres on the soul, on compassion, humility, and radical inclusion. The few statements attributed to him on sexuality — such as "anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery in his heart" (Matt. 5:28) — are deeply interior and intentionally provocative. Yet they emerge from a context of spiritual challenge, not behavioural policing. Unlike Paul, Jesus never offers systematic sexual doctrine. He never condemns same-sex intimacy. He never mandates celibacy. And, perhaps most significantly, he never falls in love, never engages eros, never inhabits the embodied tension of desiring and being desired. His celibacy, whether chosen or assumed, becomes the prototype for later Christian suspicion of pleasure — a suspicion that Paul’s writings unwittingly helped institutionalise.
This has left Christianity with a legacy of estrangement from the body — a disembodied spirituality that struggles to integrate the very desires through which we are made human. As Nietzsche acidly observed, Christianity taught people to feel guilty for what they are. And nowhere is this more visible than in its handling of sexuality. Paul’s warnings about desire, written to culturally disordered communities in the Roman world, have been reinterpreted as eternal laws — without acknowledging that the social world Paul was writing into was already collapsing under the weight of its own exploitative excesses.
It is worth remembering that Paul never received the Holy Spirit in the communal Pentecost moment described in Acts 2. He was not among the eyewitnesses. His revelation was private, his claim to apostleship contested by others. His vision of Christ was cosmic, apocalyptic, and transformative — but it lacked the embodied intimacy that characterised Jesus’ ministry. This does not disqualify Paul, but it does invite scrutiny. If Christianity is to grow in integrity, it must wrestle honestly with the limits of Paul’s witness and the contexts of his letters.
Ultimately, Paul gave the early Church a theological scaffolding that allowed it to expand across the empire. But in doing so, he also opened the door to doctrines that have too often reified control, hierarchy, and shame. We may honour his contribution while still acknowledging that it is Jesus’ ethic of embodied love — not Paul’s architecture of moral regulation — that offers the most credible foundation for human flourishing.
The recovery of that truth — that to desire, to touch, to fall, to long, to love, and to rise again — is not sin but the very condition of grace, may yet save Christianity from the consequences of its own forgetfulness.