The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle
For For serious readers of Paul and of New Testament theology; demanding, and best read after some acquaintance with Paul's letters.
Schweitzer's own exposition of Paul, promised in Paul and His Interpreters (1911) and published by J. C. B. Mohr in Tübingen in 1930; William Montgomery's English translation, with a prefatory note by F. C. Burkitt, appeared in 1931. Its thesis is that the centre of Paul's thought is not justification by faith but a mysticism of being in Christ, of dying and rising with him, and that this mysticism is eschatological, the result of Paul's conviction that the messianic age had begun with Christ's death and resurrection while the old world still went on. Justification by faith appears in this reading as a subsidiary doctrine, developed for the controversy over the Law. The book also treats the sacraments and Paul's ethics from the same standpoint. It was a major influence on later scholarship that placed participation in Christ at the centre of Paul.