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Seeking the God beyond: a Beginner’s guide to Christian apophatic spirituality

6.1-7; 13. 2) or the recognition of a charism (Gal. 2.7-8). As a result, this underlying desire to see Paul as ‘a pastor’, an office holder who exercised authority as such, underplays what can be learned from the way Paul acts pastorally. There were indeed authority issues for Paul, but it is more interesting to see how he worked at them than to search for his authority in his particular authorisation. In any case, Paul was clear about that: it came from his apostleship and as the community’s father in God. It is more interesting to discover something of how he exercised his sanctified wisdom. This leads to the second question. The feeling given is that by looking for Paul’s model of pastorship, his pattern of practice, it is possible to ‘read off’, directly from the New Testament, a model for pastors today. This is ‘applied theology’ rather than ‘contextual’ theology or theological reflection. As a primary witness to the Gospel, it is important to learn from Paul. But that is more than replicating him in our situation. There is a pastoral function in the Church and, inevitably, Paul exercised it, which means that we, as we turn again to our roots, are brought afresh to seek the wisdom that he, like us, finds in the Spirit. Nevertheless, these papers do indeed open up Paul afresh by looking at him from a different angle, and for practical theologians it is a voice that needs to be heard.